Transcript of Episode 111: Fasting Tips with Dr. Don Clum
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and special guest Dr. Don Clum.
Meredith:
Hello everyone and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. This is episode 111 and I have Dr. Pompa here, of course, and we have special guest, Dr. Don Clum. We have a really exciting topic for you guys today. We’re going to be talking about fasting, specifically water fasting, and its connection to diabetes, insulin management, ketosis, and a lot of other things.
Before we get started and jump in, I’m going to read a little bit about Dr. Clum. Dr. Don Clum, DC, graduated from Life University in Marietta, Georgia, in 1997 with a degree in Human Nutrition. He then attended Life Chiropractic College West and graduated with his Doctorate in Chiropractic in 2000. After graduation, he moved to San Jose, Costa Rica, where he was invited to work with the Costa Rican Olympic Committee and athletes. He participated in the National Central American and Caribbean-Central American Games as the team chiropractor for the country's most elite athletes through the Olympic Committee and as the official chiropractor for two professional soccer teams.
Very cool. Dr. Clum was influential in bringing the gift of chiropractic care to the people of Central America and formed the first Board recognizing chiropractic as a licensed and legal healing art in Costa Rica. After eight years in Costa Rica, Dr. Clum traveled to Spain where he practiced and did consulting for two years, and then he returned to the US and now practices at the Abundant Health Family Wellness and Chiropractic in New York, teaching patients how to achieve better health by implementing easy lifestyle changes.
He puts an emphasis on the area of weight loss, particularly for those who have had repeated challenges with losing stubborn weight and belly fat and victims of yo-yo dieting. He’s currently working towards his master’s degree in nutrition and he’s fully bilingual in Spanish and English and enjoys spending time with his wife and wonderful children. He is also an avid sports and exercise enthusiast and participates in many community events.
Welcome to the show Dr. Clum.
Dr. Clum:
Thank you. You really hit it with that bio.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m getting a little feedback on your end. Maybe turn down your volume or something or put another ear phone in perhaps.
Dr. Clum:
How is that? How are we doing?
Dr. Pompa:
Yep.
Dr. Clum:
Is that better?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re little bit distant though. You’re a little – talk again.
Dr. Clum:
Can you hear me? Is that better?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s better, no echo. Just speak up and I think we’re fine. Don I’ve known you for years, my gosh, since my early seminar days. I remember you sitting out there.
I have so much respect for what you’re doing. It’s amazing – you and your father. Your father was president of Life West where you went. He was president for 30 years. What a guy and what a family; what a heritage you come from. Your dad did great things and now you too, Don.
I was real excited to have you on the show for a few reasons, because I love the work you’re doing with diabetes. You and I line up with everything. We read a lot of the same articles, and we both love fasting and ketosis.
Don, when I saw you at the last seminar where we were both teaching, you were at somewhere around day 23, but I don’t know, 20, 21, 22, 23 of a fast, which there you went 30 days on a water fast, right? I want to start by talking a little bit about that experience. That was a unique experience obviously. We had one of our other doctors on who went 22 days, and remember at the seminar, Don, I said, “You’ve got to beat Dempsey.” Anyway, you did, but I want to talk about that experience, and I want to talk a little bit more about fasting.
Since we ran Dr. Dempsey’s – we have several of our doctors who have been doing fasts, and obviously many of their clients, but we’ve gotten e-mail after e-mail about fasting, so I want to hit some more of those questions. Tell us your experience, Don – 30 days, man. What was it like?
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, that was the longest one I’ve done to date, so that was a big one, and every time I do a fast and what ends up being a prolonged fast; it never plans on being a prolonged fast. I start with a 3-day fast. If a 3-day fast goes well, then I go 5 days. Five days moves to 8. I did 2, 12-days last year, and this time at 12 days, it was easy.
When I hit the 2-week part, it took on a whole different level and it was so easy that I just kept rolling it through, even at 30 days, I wasn’t in need. I wasn’t suffering. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t going through any problems of energy, sleep, or anything else. I was feeling very good. I could have kept going, but at some point you’ve got to stop. Everyone around me thought I was crazy, and said, “When are you going to stop?” We planned a big coming off the fast party and we went from there.
Dr. Pompa:
You came off the fast. I’m sure you were drinking beer and drinking wine and a big fat steak. Is that how that happened?
Dr. Clum:
Those thoughts go through you mind, but what I’ve done, I’ve made that mistake, thinking you can just come off the fast and just go crazy, but it only takes once or twice of doing that, and you won’t do that again. When I was coming off, I had a small breakfast. I could only get through half the breakfast, and it was a small breakfast. That day I probably only got through half my food. The next day it was pretty similar. I just started gradually coming back, and we did have a coming-off-the-fast party because my friends knew I was doing this. We had some people over and we had some good nutritional stuff a few days later, not that first day.
I originally got into fasting when I lived in Costa Rica, like you mentioned, for eight years, and when I was there, we had integrative practices, and we had a couple of medical doctors on my staff. One day a medical doctor pulled me aside. We had had a Christmas party, which is summertime there, and so we were out at the pool and this and that, and he comes over to me and says, “Hey, we need to have an appointment on Monday, you and me.” I thought, “Oh great, he’s mad at me or something like that,” so we go and we have that meeting, and he tells me, “On your back, you have a very big lesion. You’ve got a problem going on there.” He diagnosed it as skin cancer.
I never went and got it biopsied. I didn’t do anything like that. I didn’t go into a more formal approach, but I immediately started changing what I was doing. I was already doing stuff pretty well. I was young at the time, and so, younger at least, and I started doing different kinds of fasting, rotational, juicing, and stuff like that. Within six months, that lesion had grown bigger, came to the surface, and fell off.
About two years later, the same thing happened. I went to a dermatologist because I had some food poisoning and it made a rash. I wanted to know if it was contagious to see if I could go to practice or not, and she was looking at it and she says whatever she says, and then she said besides the rash, I had a mole on my neck that was doing the same thing.
Sometimes they freak out, and this and that, but she said, “That’s bad. That’s skin cancer.” Again, I didn’t get the biopsy and didn’t do anything. I went back on to the fasting, food fasting, and stuff like that and it was the same thing. Within six months, it came up, surfaced, got ugly, and it fell off.
Dr. Pompa:
At the last seminar, I called you up on stage and I had you tell about your experiences, and you said this last water fast, your skin tags were falling off, because I made that comment about somebody else. The same thing happened to you, right? These things start falling off your skin literally. That’s the beauty of fasting.
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, they get all red at first, and they turn purple, and then they start to itch and they hurt, and eventually they just dry up and fall off.
Meredith:
Are you guys having trouble hearing? I’m getting a lot of feedback and a lot of echoing.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I hear a little echoing. I think it’s coming from your computer, Don. Maybe put both ear phones in. Try that.
Dr. Clum:
All right; sorry about that guys.
Meredith:
I kept hearing the echoing about the fast conversation; it seems to be much delayed.
Dr. Clum:
How’s that? Is that any better?
Meredith:
Yeah, I don’t hear the echoing now.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It was very delayed. It was almost like another episode was playing in the background. That’s happened before. Can you hear us okay Don?
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, I can hear you. We’re all good.
Dr. Pompa:
This fasting is something that you’ve experienced yourself. You’ve experienced this with many clients, but I want you to have a little bit of conversation about pre-diabetics and diabetics fasting, because I think there’s a lot of notion that, “Hey, diabetics can’t fast,” but yet we see this happening all the time. Of course, we’re talking about fasting with supervision, and this is why we’re educating doctors around the country about these things; however, tell us your experience because you deal a lot with diabetics Don.
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, since we were in New York, we had an integrative practice there. We had a medical doctor. We had chiropractic care, a nutritionist, and we had a gym with a trainer. We had a wellness psychologist, a massage therapist, and we had our own lab there for a little while. We were doing a lot of stuff, and we were very successful, especially with diabetes, naturally getting people through this and really deciding what it means to reverse diabetes, not just blood sugar levels, but reverse the condition, the pathology of diabetes. We got very successful on the one-on-one type of style.
I have a friend who has a wellness company, which is shifting into population health, where they do corporate wellness for big companies and they do health programs, and people say, “Hey look, I want that kind of success with our population health program. We don’t just want to do the traditional thing. We want something of our own. We want your program.” He brought me out to Seattle and that’s where I am now. My wife has a chiropractic office that she runs, and I work in the population health world.
My specialty is advanced metabolic programs, specifically for the last two years, full-time, and then some I’ve been focusing on diabetes prevention, so identifying people in what I call pre-diabetes, pre-diabetes metabolic syndrome and seeing how we can reverse that. We do not go into the type two diabetes in the population. One-on-one I do, but not in the population because that’s considered disease management. We know that if they’re on that road and they’re going down that road with insulin resistance, it’s only a matter of time until they get there, statistically anywhere from five to ten years and so forth.
The challenge became that I didn’t get to see them face-to-face. We use coaches. We use education. We use webinars. We teach them different styles, methods, and approaches to lifestyle to turn this around and, consequently over time, we have a 16-week program, and we are able to see a lot of benefits, and we’re actually challenging the national diabetes prevention program, which is the gold standard for everyone medical out there with a completely unique, completely proprietary program.
We went through IRB, and just before I come out to your seminar, the day before we start your seminar in Atlanta, I’ll be at Life University working with their research team; working with the head of positive psychology and coaching; working with the head of sports health science; with nutrition, and so forth to see where we can come up with some more ways to test and to get some more data to publish about this lifestyle, this way of life, that we’re teaching.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s great, Don. Tell us a little bit about fasting and what you’ve seen with diabetes and fasting and maybe some other experiences and things you seen with fasting on some of these people in the trials.
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, that’s a great question. A lot of people mess up something as simple as not eating, right? They use it for detox. They call it a cleanse. They call it a fast. There are really a lot of ways to go about it, but we teach people the first thing is you need to have your context. Why are you doing this and where is it placed within the bigger vision of what you want for yourself and your health.
These are not one-off things. You don’t just kind of read about it and do it and hope that you’re going to get whatever you saw. You want to work with a professional, and you want to go through the right process. You want to have a pre-program. You want to launch in. We launch people into rotational concepts where they might go into a pseudo fasting, where it’s lower calories, an intermittent fasting, a fasting mimicking diet, or a ketogenic model and then go into an alternate day concept and then into a straight, what you call, block type of fast or a water fast three days, and then maybe a couple of weeks later five days and then seven days, and then bring them all the way back.
The key at the end is where are you going to go from there? You just set yourself up metabolically for some great success. What now? Do you just go back to the way you were? Why even do it? We help launch that for the rest of the year or longer, whatever they’re into.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s great. People think that diabetics or even some with pre-diabetes, how do they fast? Yet we have these amazing experiences where their blood sugar starts to normalize. Talk about that a little bit.
Dr. Clum:
The key with this is how we look at this. We look at insulin-resistance. That’s the driver of metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes, diabetes, and then cardio metabolic heart disease and so on, but the fundamental problem is insulin resistance.
If you start to look at through a hormonal view, through the hormonal lens, versus a caloric versus a blood sugar model, the whole atmosphere and terrain changes dramatically. Things that are okay for a “diabetic,” according to blood sugar rules, are not okay for them, according to insulin rules, and it’s the insulin that drives the problem not the blood sugar. Blood sugar is an artifact. It’s almost irrelevant in a lot of people if you’re focusing on the insulin.
Now, they come in with their blood sugar up and down. They’re worried. They’re monitoring. That’s fine. There’s no risk with fasting for type two diabetics. We’re not talking about type one diabetes; we’re talking about type two diabetes, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and insulin resistance. They respond very well, because when you’re focused on the hormonal side, diabetes, pre-diabetes, and metabolic syndrome, first and foremost, before it’s anything else, it’s a liver problem. It’s a liver problem, and so we are looking at it from that point of view. By the time it gets to the pancreas and you see pancreatic dysfunction, and pancreatic damage, that is way down the line. You can identify this 10 years, 15 years, or 20 years earlier if we start to look at the metabolism and the behavior of the liver first and foremost.
Dr. Pompa:
Talk a little bit about that, because people are going, “Wait a minute. I thought my problem was a pancreas problem; producing insulin or a glucose problem.” You’re saying it’s a liver problem. Explain that further Don.
Dr. Clum:
We can start back to the pancreas. We can lead it back to the pancreas. We know about insulin. Insulin comes from the beta cells within the eyelets within the pancreas. Most practitioners get that, but that’s a beta cell. The beta cell is acting on the alpha cell, where there’s a beta there’s an alpha and vice versa.
The alpha cell is the glucagon-producing cells, and so first and foremost what insulin does is it turns off glucagon, because glucagon goes through the system, gets to the liver, and it shuts off the production or release of blood sugar into the blood. The liver controls your blood sugar 100%.
The sugar that’s in your blood right now and even after the meal is not from that meal. It’s from your liver and it could be from yesterday or the day before, depending on your metabolic state, because in our whole body, we only have five grams of blood sugar when we have a normal range of blood sugar. Five grams is less than a packet, and the difference between normal and type two diabetes is one gram extra of sugar, so if someone eats a meal of 50, 75, or 100 grams of sugar, that’s not blasting through their system. That goes through their intestines, into the liver, and the liver has to deal with that and make sure it’s releasing. What glucagon does is it makes it release it into the blood; insulin turns that off and so when we see the blood sugar go down because of insulin, it’s not because it’s pushing it into cells, it’s because it’s not releasing any more from the liver.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s the thing. I think during these fasts, when we do these periodic fasts, whether it’s daily, just fasting 24 hours periodically, intermittent fasting, pushing out before you eat 18 or 20 hours a meal, or a block fast, periodically doing this type of restriction, even ketosis is a type of restriction, Don, what we see is that change in the liver don’t we? All of a sudden it’s like all of those things have a profound effect on the liver. Many of these – I always call them the skinny diabetics – have fatty livers. The problem is, in fact, the liver, and yet these types of things that we’re discussing here have such a dramatic effect on the liver and there are so many aspects to how the liver affects your health.
Dr. Clum:
The liver –
Dr. Pompa:
Particle, cholesterol, glucose, insulin. Go ahead.
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, the liver has to change first. The liver is a metabolic director of this whole thing, and what happens is, when this sugar is being bombarded to the liver, it’s putting it into glycogen, but it still can’t release the extra. When the glycogen is full, more sugar keeps coming in. It’s got to go somewhere. We make triglycerides and we put it in the liver, and that’s when get fatty liver.
In the nephrology journal I read about three months ago from Jason Fung, he sent me, they say that in 10 years, the number one disease globally, around the world, is going to be nonalcoholic fatty liver because of this. Everyone’s going down that road, and so the liver gets fat. That’s the dangerous fat. That’s the beginning of visceral fat. As it spills out of the liver, that’s how it gets to the pancreas. You get pancreas fat and other visceral fats.
Visceral fats are not the same as adipose. When you do something like a fast and when you go low insulin or ketogenic or a combination thereof that visceral fat burns off first. It burns off twice as fast as your body fat, because body fat is not really dangerous, but that visceral fast is. The body won’t lose the body fat until the liver fat and visceral fat is down. That’s why some people can do all the right things for a long time and not lose weight but suddenly kick off.
Dr. Pompa:
I want to point out, by the way, that a lot of skinny people have too much visceral fat, too much liver fat, fatty liver, and those are our skinny, unhealthy people. Those people are thinking, “Well, I can’t fast, because I don’t have enough muscle.” Oh no, you’ve got plenty of visceral fat, toxic visceral fat, because the visceral fat is what holds the toxins most often. You have a fatty liver and your body will not go after that needed tissue like the muscle. It will go after that visceral fat, that fatty liver, first. It’s that intelligent, or even tumors, as we’ve discussed on other shows. All these other tissues that are bad tissues, the body is so intelligent that it literally start to utilize those tissues as energy first, which is absolutely remarkable, Don. On your fast, man, how much weight did you lose? Thirty days, that’s a –
Dr. Clum:
I lost 23 pounds and I can tell you that I working out with a full workout, so heavy lifting, intensity training, and cardio for the first week, then I dropped the heavy lifting. I dropped everything after the second week and from the second week going into the third and fourth is when my body composition really shifted. I saw it in my face. My waist went down dramatically. Things shifted around. That’s when something extra kicked in.
I lost a bunch of weight. I did the scans and the in-body, three-frequency biometric scans, and I lost fat. I lost a lot of water. That’s another thing. People think that, “Oh, that’s just water weight.” Yeah, that’s very important. Extra water, extra fluid, extra gunk floating around there is just mediating bad stuff and inflammation. You don’t want that in there. Even if all I lost was water weight, which it wasn’t, that would still be a move in the right direction.
I tell people, when you’re doing the right stuff like we direct people in our programs out there, it’s always working. Whether it works on what you want it to work on or not, that’s questionable, but it’s always working. I told you the story about the patient who came to me and she had a CT scan. Her liver was two-and-a-half times that of normal. That’s a medical emergency, but she didn’t want to go that route, so we worked together and because it was so big, so jammed, and so dysfunctional, it took five and a half months before she would even get into ketosis. We were doing fasting, ketosis, and everything you could imagine, but once it did, from that point on, the weight just started coming off and at nine months when we rescanned the liver, it was normal.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you know, Don, it’s so true. Some people just can’t understand, “Why am I not getting into ketosis?” These are terrible malfunctioning mitochondria liver, and this is a sign that something is very wrong, but the good news is, is the genes, the genetics, start to change. The mitochondria, the bad ones that can’t adapt, start to die off. The body starts to shift and eventually it happens, Don.
We even do something called diet variation, where you move people in and out of these different phases, and you and I are both believers in periodic restriction times, whether it’s ketosis; whether it’s fasting, intermittent fasting. We always say that every fast health happens to another level. You’ve experienced that even in yourself, and I’m sure you’ve experienced it with patients.
Dr. Clum:
Even going with three meals a day, before this call I was in the office and I had a call with a client for the state. The entire state is our client and their employees. I’m dealing with the HR people. I’m dealing with their team of dieticians and two of their RNs of their lifestyle advisory board, and they’re arguing with why we tell people to eat three meals a day and not snack.
Just on that topic alone, I had a 32-slide PowerPoint with 26 studies and probably 25 different quotes from the old American Dietetics Association, they changed their name, just showing that none of this is conflicting and that the information is out there, and when you’re looking from a hormonal point of view, you can’t do the same old things.
The five to seven meals a day is killing people out there, and so the first step is just eat three meals a day. You don’t even have to change what you’re eating. “Ms. Jones, if you don’t want to do all this. Eat the junk, but just make it breakfast, lunch, and dinner with nothing in between, and when you start feeling better, promise me you’ll ask me for more,” and they do.
Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Don you and I agree on that. That’s the first thing that I have to do with some people. I don’t just move them directly into intermittent fasting where they can go 20 hours, because most people can’t. If they went 20 hours without food, they’re angry; they’re irritable; they’re moody; they have no energy; and their brain doesn’t work, right?
We do the same thing. We say, “Look, no food; no snacks between meals. Go to three meals a day, and it’s remarkable how hard that is for people, but, Don, you’re exactly right. The old adage of eating five or six meals a day is killing people. Every study shows that if you want to live longer, eat less, and more specifically, eat less often.
Dr. Clum:
It’s not always the amount; it’s the frequency. When they shift over and eating three meals a day, they go, “Oh, this is easier than I thought.”
Dr. Pompa:
Then you can skip a meal.
Dr. Clum:
Exactly, all those weird reactions that they get, the dizziness, realize that those are detox reactions, not low blood sugar. Then, they get stable, and you say, “Okay, now Tuesday and Thursday, skip breakfast.” Then the next week say, “Monday, Wednesday, Friday, skip breakfast.” It’s simple.
Then they do an alternate day, and if they never move beyond that, then we’re going to move them to whole foods. Add more fat; cut the carbs, because if you’re building like that, when you do it that way, you start with the brain chemistry, with the carb addiction cycle. You work on the body chemistry with the serotonin addiction cycle of the pancreas, which is a whole other toxin potentially, and then you hit both of those. Then the hormones follow, and it’s the hormones that drive metabolism.
Every other program is trying to manipulate metabolism with calories and reduction versus elimination and it doesn’t work. It makes people worse. You have to eliminate some things, and that might even be a snack or a meal, not just a type of food.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We get into the debates, right? Turn on the television, and they’re going to talk about another low-fat, low-calorie diet. How many calories does this have? Nobody can be successful pushing food away saying, “I’m going to eat less.” It doesn’t work that way.
Dr. Clum:
It’s miserable.
Dr. Pompa:
You have to eat less often to live longer. Ultimately at the end of the day, Don, you and I have less calories than the average person, but never do we not eat until full. We eat to full every meal. Sometimes I eat beyond full. The point is, at the end of the day, I eat less.
Dr. Clum:
We talked about it as well. There are also advantages. Everyone is a little bit different. There is also the metabolic profile of people who eat breakfast and a late lunch and no dinner, and so sometimes it takes working with someone to know what their biorhythm is going to be. We like to track as much as we can – blood sugar and their weight, and people don’t like to track their weight every day, but that’s how you learn your biorhythm. You figure out what metabolically is better for you, because any step in that direction is better than nothing.
The next step comes down to what I think is one of the biggest metabolic secrets out there is what we call glycogen flexibility. That comes from physical activity. First, we tell people to change what you eat; change when you eat, and then you change how you move because now they’re considering declaring skeletal muscle as endocrine tissue. They want to make it an endocrine organ because it generates hormones, just like they did with the heart in 1987, saying it’s an endocrine organ more than anything because of the hormones and neurotransmitters and influence it has on the body.
They are looking at skeletal muscle the same way, and glycogen flexibility is huge because of the mitochondria. You can up your number of mitochondria. You can make them more efficient. That’s your engine. You get a more efficient, bigger engine, and then the glycogen is your ability to store that energy. That can shift from a sedentary person to someone who trains regularly 2,000 percent, and from someone to trains regularly, just exercise to a competitive athlete another 2,000 percent. That’s a 4,000 percent shift in their gas tank.
Most people out there have small, little engines, inefficient engines, and they have tiny little gas tanks and so that blood sugar that should be going in and out there is spilling over into their blood and hitting the next phase down the line.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about that. Actually, you know one of my best friends, Tom Eisman, Dr. Tom, one of the strongest guys in the world. Am I right on that?
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, if not the strongest body weight to lift ability ever recorded.
Dr. Pompa:
I remember once he hadn’t powerlifted in years, and we were in chiropractic school together, and he decided to do an all-natural powerlifting competition, and we were there in the show and he decides he’s going to open with 500 and something, and Tom weighed 165 pounds. They were thinking, “This nutcase, he’s opening with 550?” He just yanks it right up. Tom didn’t even make a noise.
After that, all these people came and said, “How much does this guy do?” I said, “I don’t know. Tom ended up winning the whole lift at 667 or something, and then they found out it’s Tom Eisman, who holds an 800-pound, world-record deadlift. Anyway, that’s another subject for another day. We both love Tom.
Talk a little bit about that though. There are benefits. I always say, “Hey look, high-intensity exercise is better for weight loss; however, there are great benefits to endurance and even a combination is great for people. I do both. I love both. Talk about how many days a week. What if they don’t have enough energy? Give some recommendations on exercise.
Dr. Clum:
There are really four different genres, so to speak, of exercise. We have weightlifting. We have traditional cardio. You have intensity training, and then we have what we call stress relief cardio. They all show benefit, but there are some studies out there that show the combination of these things work better than any one of them apart by far. You can track the A1C blood levels. You can track the insulin, and you can track the benefit.
Just like with the rotational fast and eating styles, we use what’s called a variable output exercise program. In the worlds I travel, if you say high-intensity interval training you’ll get thrown out. That’s a bad word.
Dr. Pompa:
How does the word fasting working in those areas?
Dr. Clum:
No, no that’s an alternate day eating plan. That’s rotational meal timing. We have to tread around that very carefully, so the variable output exercises, how do you incorporate them? You might only need one or two days of weights, or you might have one or two days of cardio, or you might not even get into intensity for a while.
We tell people to come back to the stress relief cardio. That’s go take a walk. Go on a treadmill if that’s your thing and go for a while.
Dr. Pompa:
Sometimes that’s all they can do.
Dr. Clum:
That doesn’t count as your exercise. That’s not exercise. That’s stress relief cardio. You’re changing things. You don’t put the headphones on. You don’t put sunglasses on. You don’t have your hands in your pockets. You go and you get that cross-crawl pattern, and what that does is it turns off the conscious, sympathetic side of the nervous system and goes into the parasympathetic automatic intrinsic nervous system in the muscles, and then your brain will light up and your creativity centers and regeneration centers will light up because they’re not focused on thinking about what you have to do, because they know how to walk. That’s why when people do it after 20 minutes of a steady pace, when they stop, they feel their muscles go “tick, tick, tick, tick,” almost like a car when you turn off the engine and it’s still clicking through.
That’s what you’re doing. You’ve just activated intrinsic muscles and that’s why a lot of creativity – Einstein says he came up with the theory of relatively while he was riding his bike, and all these people they come up with ideas while they’re physically active. Think about it when you’re on a tough phone call. What do you do? I put my headset on and I start walking around. You’ve got to create those things and it’s an easier thing. By creating some kind of pattern, do something every day. Even at this rate, you can do it two times a day and just spread them out.
You’ve got four options. You can lift some weights. Try to go as heavy as you can with being safe. You can go traditional cardio. We all know what that is, the old fashioned cardio. You can do the stress relief audio by taking a while here and there, maybe on a break or maybe before or after a meal or something like that.
Then you have the variable output exercise, or the high-intensity training, which they can look into and they mix up a little bit of cardio with the weights. Now you have a great menu of options and they all do a little bit of something different to improve that glycogen flexibility and enhance your metabolic performance in your body.
Dr. Pompa:
We interviewed Ben Greenfield on the show, and he did the interview on a treadmill. This guy is a triathlete. He’s a fad-adapted triathlete. He’s in ketosis, and he’s so active that I’m sure he can do 100 grams of carbs a day and still be in ketosis, because he eats tons of vegetables, and it still doesn’t throw him out of ketosis, but he exercises all day. He runs to get the mail. He does pushups. He runs down; he does sprints; he does pushups. This guy is active all day. He does meetings; he’s on his treadmill, so he doesn’t sit much.
It’s always possible, but I agree, Don, that variation is great. Some people have to start with something so simple until they have enough cellular energy even to do some of the other types of exercise, but resistive training, I’ll tell you what, it’s huge for really getting the cells to hear the hormones and what it does to hormone sensitivity. Resistive training is underappreciated in the diabetic world. We both know that.
Dr. Clum:
We talk about that from a neurological standpoint. We talk about that as a neurological tone. Practitioners out there know the difference between sympathetic and parasympathetic, and you hear a lot about sympathetic dominance. I’m not a big fan of that idea because sympathetics don’t get overly revved when you look at it and actually test. What happens is the parasympathetics get weakened.
We talk about the sympathetics being the gas and the parasympathetics being the breaks. You need both of those to navigate your car down the
street, and you need both of those to navigate your body through life. Even if you’re not slamming on the gas going 100 miles per hour, you’re going to be going 20 miles an hour down the street, but if your breaks don’t work, you’re going to crash and you might end up crashing 10 or 15 times a day. That’s what we see, and so it gets labeled at sympathetic dominance when it’s really a parasympathetic weakness.
With diabetics, that’s fundamentally really, really strong. What a lot of practitioners misinterpret is on the side of parasympathetics, there are two sub-sides in there. There’s growth and there’s repair. You touched on it earlier. Growth is something you want when you’re a child growing or when you’re a pregnant momma building a baby. That’s really it. Everything else that we think is growth, like muscles and getting stronger and flexible, that’s really repair.
There’s a difference in a hormone set like insulin and so forth for growth, and there’s a different hormone set for repair, which is more like human growth hormone, and they oppose each other. There’s not but one thing. You don’t get both. It’s either one or the other, so all these people are eating pre-workout, post-workout, and workouts during the day trying to get big and strong. They think they’re growing and they are. They’re in growth, but what they really want is repair and they’re down regulating it. The problem is, if you stay in growth, growth happens, whether it’s body fat, extra tissue, or tumors, and you just don’t want that.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk a little bit about that. I mean, there’s a lot of debate out there whether you eat before you work out; whether you eat after you work out. How much time do you give it after workouts? I’m a firm believer in exercising on an empty stomach because of the growth hormone rise. I read study after study and that’s what I do, because of the studies. Talk a little bit about that.
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, you nailed it. I’ve heard you speak about it well. That’s exactly right. People mistake the concept of working out while fasting. It doesn’t mean like I was on a two-week fast where you’re trying to do a triathlon. This means don’t eat before you work out. It can be either wake up and work out before breakfast or wait four hours after your last meal to work out. That metabolic profile is what we’re looking for.
If you set up with sugar and insulin, whether it’s from a whey protein sugar-modified milkshake pre-workout or a meal, you’re going to affect your workout. You’re not going to have the energy. You’re not going to have the stamina, and you’re not going to get the hormonal response, and if you do and then you end your workout and you have the traditional, post-workout shake, you’re just going to hit the insulin. You’re going to turn off the growth hormone. You’re going to set it up.
We talk about it all the time. What we do during the day through the way we eat, the way we stand, how we move our body, exercise, and everything else, sets a stage for a grand, theatrical presentation at night when we sleep hormonally.
We’re doing all these little things. We’re not growing. We’re not doing anything during the day, we’re just setting up the stage; therefore, when you sleep, everyone comes out to play in the creek of symphonic inner coordination. There’s this grand presentation in your body that repairs. It detoxes, builds muscle, and burns fat. That’s when it happens, but if you’re cutting off your own nose to spite your face by eating the wrong thing post workout or treating yourself for a Dairy Queen after doing so well or not sleeping, that’s a big one. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not getting that benefit. You’re taking two steps forward and one step back.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, how long do you like to eat after a workout, and talk about a good meal post workout?
Dr. Clum:
As long as I can go after a workout is normal. I work out at about 5:00 a.m. and I do my thing and then I probably won’t eat until about 1:00 or 2:00 o’clock. In the beginning, it gets a little bit weird, but a lot of that comes down to water and when you do eat, make sure you’re using whole sea salt to get you all those natural electrolytes. I’m not talking Gatorade or anything like that.
That’s what I was noticing when I was fasting too. If I didn’t supplement it with those natural salts, I had problems. I got cramps. It got weird stuff and stuff I didn’t think I was going to get to be honest, but I did, and as soon as I either took the salt directly, until it started giving me sores, I put it on a little piece of fat or something like a piece of an avocado or a teaspoon of coconut oil every day then suddenly the detox reaction; the really, really super cold that some people get that I got when I was prolonged fasting went way.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I wanted you to talk about that too, because the salt, the electrolytes are the magic. You need the salt. Like you said, “If I didn’t do the salt, I would be really cold,” but being cold is part of fasting. Your body is resting. It’s metabolic engine is not revved up, so of course your body temperature goes down a little bit, but what a difference when you take in the salt, right? You said that and you carried your little salts when I saw you.
Dr. Clum:
I have them right there. I take them everywhere. I have three different kinds of sea salts from around the world, just to get some variety, but we found that with other people fasting, it’s one thing to get a little bit cold, but what I think most people experience, especially in the beginning of a fast or the first time they do it, they’re not getting cold. We’ve tested their temperature, and their core temperature is not going down. What’s happening is they’re so used to burning hot by being a sugar burner, a chronic sugar burner; having those toxins that they are running red all the time, but when they shift to normal, they feel cold. It’s like when you’re cold and you step in a hot tub, it feels like your toes are burning. Your toes aren’t burning, but it feels that way because of the contrast. I think that’s what a lot of people feel.
Once you move past that stage in a prolonged fast, you can get that deep – I haven’t noticed much core temperature change, but it feels like that. A jacket doesn’t help. It’s not about putting gloves on. You have this deep sensation of cold that the electrolytes, which help with thermal regulation or at least the sensation of it, change a lot.
Dr. Pompa:
It does. The sea salt and electrolytes are really key and it’s important. I think that’s one of the most important aspects and, of course, how you break the fast. What did you eat day one and day two after you broke the fast?
Dr. Clum:
Day one I put it on Facebook, because everyone wants to know that. They think I’m going to go get a jumbo burger or something like that, but I got a salad dish, and I had about a cup of homemade coleslaw with homemade mayo that we make. I had two eggs, and I had some micro greens. We have a closet garden, and I had a bunch of micro greens and I had a little bit of homemade kimchee.
Part of my post-fast concept is not just to go back. I want to reconstitute. Just a little tag here, a 28-day fast – I told you I’m not going to do it again, but this is interesting – a 28-day fast is enough to genetically alter your gut bacteria to a new species. Two thousand generations is what it takes for any genetic lineage to change as a species – to really change, not just epigenetics, but change the fundamentals.
Since bacteria only lives 20 minutes, that equates to about 28 days, and so by the 30th day, I knew I had an opportunity to replant, repopulate and really influence that gut bacteria. I went kind of heavy, but I had a little bit of fermented foods and I had a rotational diet. I had all sorts of fermented foods that were prepared for this that I took in so that we could feed the good guys and hopefully let the bad guys stay away and just reconstitute.
That’s what I’m saying. Post fast, that was my thing. I need to rebuild my gut and I did it little by little, and so that was the first meal. I only ate half of it. I really couldn’t take the volume, because your hunger is not there. You’re just not hungry. It looked good. I took a picture and put it on Facebook like everyone else, but I couldn’t get through it. I saved it and I ate it maybe around two and then just worked from there. There was a lot if vinegar stuff and fermented stuff we canned and pickled that we did and just high fat, moderate protein.
Dr. Pompa:
People try to eat a lot of raw and sometimes they get a little bogged down, so just some soft-cooked vegetables are easier to digest and some berries and things. They’re simple foods, but the ferments are key. We call it re-inoculation where we want to re-inoculate the good bacteria, because you starve down all bacteria, and you’re right, that’s your opportunity to bring in these good guys that couldn’t exist before. You take all the darn bacteria and eating the fermented foods and you’re still not populating your gut because there’s too much bad, but when you starve it all down, boy, this is your opportunity to re-inoculate. Don, you did it right, Dr. Don, you did it right.
Dr. Clum:
It made sense to me. We’re actually taking things to another level in the research that I’m doing on the side as we do the diabetes prevention program because this whole thing about insulin resistance and how it drives all degenerative disease, heart disease, cancers, dementias, you name, is so profound to me. I always wonder why it’s so easy to raise our blood sugar. You can do it by a thought, food, activities, or whatever you want, but it’s so hard to lower it.
The key is, evolutionarily speaking, we never had to lower it. You absolutely never had to lower it because we didn’t have that contact. I’m looking at diabetes and the damage to the pancreas and wondering why it is so profound. It really can happen so fast.
We know about the carbs and insulin, but I think the other side of it comes down to cooked food. We haven’t been cooking food all that long, definitely not the 40,000 years that it would take to genetically change our structure to adapt to it, and so what happens when you cook food it ruptures the cells – overcooked, not lightly cooked – but most people cook, fry, or whatever, and so it gets to your belly and there’s no more enzymes in there. They’re dead.
Your stomach acid would have normally killed the enzymes, but they dissolve from the inside out and they release the nutrients, so when you cook them, you rupture them. Now, it’s in your belly – no enzymes – so your body has to put enzymes in there to get them out of your gut and that comes from the pancreas. Here’s the pancreas shooting out insulin because of the junk we’re eating, and now here it is, everything we eat is shooting out pancreatic enzymes in there, and so it’s getting hit on both ends here and we’re just wearing that thing out.
One of the recommendations we’re going to move to is not only do we want you to eat three meals a day, whole foods versus processed foods and eat as much as you can raw. That’s going to be the next step I think, because we’re trying to take that pancreatic load of the enzymes off –
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s true. People don’t that any more. Yeah, what I’m referencing is just right after a fast. I’ve had people just eat a salad and they can’t digest it. Yeah, right after a fast, oftentimes just lightly cooked it helps break it down because they don’t have the enzymes. That’s the point. They can’t break it down, so we need to break some of it down with the process of cooking just for a day or two. It seems like even the next day they can start eating some of the raw stuff again without some cramping going on. Start slow, folks, start slow and low.
Dr. Clum:
It even happened to me. I had some digestive stress going through it. Some of the vegetables actually release more nutrients when you lightly cook them, especially the ones that we’ve bred, not genetically modified.
Dr. Pompa:
Some things are better cooked, yeah.
Dr. Clum:
Things like broccoli and the sturdier and bigger things that when you look at an indigenous species versus what we have now, they’re completely different. Those need a little bit of a pop to them.
Dr. Pompa:
No doubt; some things give off more nutrients cooked; no doubt, some don’t. I think still you’re right though. People hardly eat vegetables or any raw foods anymore really. We overcook everything, and of course frying and all that stuff, that’s a whole other subject. That’s a whole other level of cooking, but I couldn’t agree more and those are some great thoughts.
Ketosis, let’s quickly talk a little bit about ketosis, because it’s another ancient healing strategy that we love. We love these restricted fasts, intermittent fasting, and both of us believe that these are the keys to change the epigenome. These are the keys to that deep healing that we need for the epidemic of diseases that we’re seeing today. Ketosis is one of them. Talk a little bit about that.
Dr. Clum:
Yeah, ketosis, that’s a fascinating thing. People have a lot of trouble with it. Genetically, we’re a little bit different and we handle things differently, but what people don’t realize is that one, you’re not in ketosis 24/7. Even if you don’t eat, your body still makes some sugar, anywhere from 80 grams and some say up to 200 grams of sugar.
The body has no problem making sugar. Glycogenesis is from glycerol, from breaking down fat, from ketones, from lactic acid from working out, and from fragmented muscle that gets broken down when we work out. It’s not that the body takes it from healthy muscle to make sugar, when we move and when we break down fibers, those fragments get made into sugar. I had an argument with someone today about it, and so we can make it very easily, and so we’re never in a constant state of ketosis. It goes in and out and you can test it. That’s pretty cool and is part of the biorhythm.
What people don’t realize is that insulin is a fundamental determinate in whether you can be in ketosis or not, because insulin, not only does it go in and turn off the blood sugar and all this, but when it gets to a cell that’s not insulin dependent, such as not a gluc-4 carrier, not muscle or fat basically, it gets into the cell; it gets into the mitochondria; it goes through the Krebs cycle and it physically blocks fat from entering the Krebs cycle to produce energy.
If you want to be a fat burner, which would eventually lead to being a ketone producer, even a rotational ketone producer, you’ve got to stay away from that insulin. As soon as that comes on board, it shuts that off on an inter-mitochondrial Krebs cycle level.
Dr. Pompa:
No, I couldn’t agree more. No doubt, I’ve seen people where it just takes them a while to literally turn on the gene for gluconeogenesis and they’ll get sugar from anywhere but fat. Until that genome changes, their body will genetically become so clever in gluconeogenesis, whether it’s breaking this tissue down, protein, their muscle, or whatever it takes, it will not want to burn fat. Eventually it changes. Eventually, through these things that we’re talking about, these ancient healing strategies, the body will shift over and make that change, but it takes time for broken people.
Dr. Clum:
It’s like a muscle for anybody. If you’re not used to it and you’ve been a 40-year sugar burner, like you’ve been teaching for years and you try to shift over, it’s hard. It’s like going to the gym and trying to run ten miles and you’ve never done it. It’s going to be hard. You’re going to feel things. It’s going to be wonky. You’re going need to recover, and then the next time you do it, it’ll still be hard but eventually it will get easier.
Everyone argues about the brain and blood sugar. Yet, there is some really great literature out there that shows when the brain has an injury – when we have a traumatic injury – it doesn’t have to be concussion, it could be a sub-concussion level when we bump our head, the brain automatically switches over to ketones. I go, “Wow, that’s not a malfunction.” When the brain feels vulnerable; when the brain is suspect to problems; when the brain needs to lock things down and get things done, it goes to ketones automatically, even if there is sugar in the system. That tells me a lot right there.
If that’s the ideal metabolic pathway in signs of distress, I’d want to do it during health as well.
Dr. Pompa:
My daughter hit her head. She had her second concussion when she was in Europe, and I said, “You’re going to have to fast, honey, for four days at least,” because the second one was worse. All the symptoms were back. She couldn’t focus. She couldn’t concentrate, so she went four days. On day two I got an e-mail where she said, “I can’t do it; it’s worse,” and I said, “You’ll be fine.” On day three, she was a little better. On day four she said, “Oh my gosh! “ She fixed it. Ketones heal the brain, no doubt, like you said. It will turn on the ketones, man, just to fix itself. Isn’t it remarkable – the DNA intelligence?
I’ll tell you, Don, from intermittent fasting daily, right now I’m not in ketosis. I will be going in probably in a month, because I move in and out of this state; however, I intermittent fast, so if I measured my ketones in blood sugar this morning, I’d say I’d be 80 on blood sugar or maybe 70, and let’s say I’m 0.2 or 0.3 on ketones, by 3 or 4 when I eat this afternoon, my ketones will be 0.6 or 0.7, even though I’m not in ketosis. I’m eating healthy, and of course, I’m on a cellular healing diet, but I go in to ketosis just because it rises as I am intermittent fasting and my blood sugar, of course, will be low 70s if not high 60s.
Dr. Clum:
That’s great and good to know. You want to know that. It took me a long time to realize that I’m very insulin reactive, genetically, whatever you want to say, I can fight it all I want, but I’ve had metabolic syndrome before. I can gain and lose weight easily, and it’s frustrating as a natural person working and teaching in this thing, but I had to come to grips that I’m just genetically very insulin reactive. I’ve got to watch those things, and those biorhythms help me a lot. I can look okay, but I can go off the path if I’m not careful due to stress or inactivity if I don’t – I go through spurts with my working out or how I’m eating and so forth, so I have to hold to a tighter line than most people, even with some of my clients. That’s just the way it is.
Dr. Pompa:
I have to hold a tighter line too. I get fat easy. I do a carb day a week, but if I eat a lot of grain, I get fat and I get fat around my waist. I get the visceral fat; I get the worst fat. I get the visceral fat in between the organs. That’s where I start putting it on first. I had high blood pressure and elevated glucose, and I wasn’t obese. No doubt, I get fatty liver. I get bad visceral fats.
Dr. Clum:
It’s easy to pull that energy back and forth, so that might have something to do with why it goes to the visceral sometimes first, or it depends on what we’re eating, especially with grains or things like that, but we know, speaking of visceral fat, we know exactly how much a metabolic syndrome or type two diabetic weight they have to lose off their body to become non-metabolic or non-type two diabetes.
We know, but everyone says, “Well, it depends on how much they start as,” but I say, “No, it doesn’t,” and they say, “Well, it’s a percentage,” and then I say, “No, it’s not. It’s a finite number, and it’s the same for everyone, whether there are at 200 pounds or 350 pounds.” They ask, “What the heck are you talking about?” I tell them, “It’s 1 gram of fat that has to come off that body, and when it does you’re no longer diabetic or have metabolic syndrome, but it has to come out of your pancreas.” That gram has to come out of your pancreas. If it’s coming from anywhere else, it doesn’t matter.
That’s why someone can be overweight and not have metabolic issues or they can be skinny and have metabolic issues, because it’s not going to notice 1 gram, but if it’s in there in that 70-gram organ, it’s not very big, then that’s creating a dysfunction.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s why these restrictive moments that we move people in and out of are so important because that’s really the only thing that’s going to touch that, Don. Do you understand?
Dr. Clum:
That’s it.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s the only thing that’s going to touch what’s in the pancreas or what’s in the liver. That’s it.
Dr. Clum:
You can’t exercise it out.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m a firm believer that our ancestors – when you look at the Hunza people, I always say, “It’s not what they’re eating that makes them live so long without diseases; in other tribes in Tibet and other places as well, it’s the fact that they vary their diet. In the summer, they’re eating mostly vegetables. They are practically vegetarians. In the winter, they’re into ketosis, and in the spring they have what they call starvation spring where they are forced into times of restriction.
In the past, our ancestors always had times of restriction for whatever reason, but today we don’t get that. We’re never going into these times of restriction where we’re really causing our body to have to adapt and therefore eat these bad tissues; eat the bad cells. The bad cells don’t adapt; therefore, we’re creating healthier mitochondria. We don’t do that today. Even if you’re eating a perfect diet and doing all these things, you are missing it if you’re not going through these diet variations and these times of restriction, and I believe that’s what fixes the pancreas and liver.
Dr. Clum:
I think when you know it at the level that you’re speaking to, and we’re learning along the way, is that it becomes and ethical if not a moral issue to recommend certain things. I had that conversation with the state today. They wanted information on three meals a day.
They wanted us to create a program that bridges the insurance carrier low fat/low cal concept with our concept, and I said, “I won’t do it. I cannot do a program that I know and that research has shown to be a net negative in the long run for any weight loss today.” It’s unethical to me and immoral and I would be – I couldn’t do it.
A lot of these people, if they don’t hear this, they’re going down that road and we’re actually – if you want to talk about the genetic replication that we said for changing a genome, we’re doing that right now. Epigenetically and eventually hard lining this, we’re making the species weaker if we don’t step it up and hold a higher standard.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. I want to point out one thing you said about toxicity playing a major role in diabetes. You said, “Hey, diabetes is a liver problem.” I couldn’t agree more, and how much toxin is affecting that in the pancreas. When looking at studies showing type two diabetes, they said it’s estimated that 30% of it is toxin related, and I believe it’s even higher than that.
Who knows where it is when you look at the epigenome? Maybe it’s 80%, but toxicity is key to everything we’re talking about, and it’s a multi-therapeutic approach that I teach when we are dealing with cellular detox. It’s huge. Doing it right and not just doing these little cleanses downstream, but up the stream to the cell and even the brain, and if you put that with these ancient healing strategies, varying the diet, intermittent fasting daily, and block fasting and everything we’re talking about today it is important.
Don, I take my hat off to you because you’re a practitioner who is doing this stuff that we know really works, and you know what? We’re trying to train more people like us, Don. That’s the goal. You’ll be at my seminar in Atlanta. We have approximately 200 new doctors there that we’re teaching this stuff to, and we need to grow as a community.
Dr. Clum:
I’ve been putting it out there. I got into this at a much higher level. When I was outside the country for ten years and I came back in and I saw that everything had changed, sickness, fat kids, the whole thing was going off, and that’s when I really got into it.
My first introduction was with some of those intensive days with you and Jack Tips in New Jersey and New York, and from the first day that I saw you, you both did a version of the cell talk with the cell and the hormones. From that day, I merged it and put my own stuff in there and that became the basis of every talk we did, whether it was for chiropractic, nutrition, or wellness. I even talked a medical doctor into using this because this is the fundamental essence and you covered it so well.
I give you total credit and kudos for that and opening that up. That has to be the basis of everything. We use that all the time and every single day. It’s in all our stuff that we use as an analogy to help people understand that this is where it comes from and everything else that they’re seeing is really an effect, and if you fix this, things take care of themselves. I’m glad because the body is smarter than us.
Dr. Pompa:
Do doubt about it – Dr. Don, we appreciate you, man. Thank you so much for sharing. Hey Meredith finished her four-day fast, right Meredith? You went four days on just water just a week ago.
Meredith:
I did. It was my first water fast. I had done a few broth fasts, and a whey water fast, but the water was always kind of intimidating to me, but Dr. Clum at the event and Dr. Dempsey definitely inspired my first four-day water fast, and I’m definitely going to do another longer water fast soon, when the timing is right. I think maybe in the next few weeks, but I’m excited to do it again.
Dr. Pompa:
Meredith, I have to ask you this because I just had a client tell me who has done whey water fasting and broth fasting that water fasting was so much easier for them.” How did you feel about that? Was water fasting easier than broth fasting or whey water fasting? Were they the same? What was your experience?
Meredith:
It was actually easier after the first day. I think, like anything, it’s all mental. When you’re busy and finding things to do and you’re staying focused on your goals, then I actually thought the water was easier. The last broth fast I did I actually had some digestive issues, which I had never had before. I thought that was kind of interesting with the broth, because I had done about two, four-day broth fasts before, and then the one I did in January, I just didn’t feel well the entire time. That’s why I was kind of curious to try the water as well, and I felt a lot better doing the water than the broth.
Dr. Pompa:
Different fasts have different benefits. Sometimes we put people into modified fasts where they do water with some simple fats, whether it’s olive oils, coconut oils, NCT oils, but there are all types of different fasts, but I do believe the most healing of all is the water fast. It really is, and I think people are intimidated from it, but the body’s innate intelligence knows what to do. Animals fast instinctively. They do. They get sick; they break a limb or anything, they just immediately do not eat and they just drink water.
Humans, we need to be taught, but I think Dr. Dempsey said it on the call, right, the Bible talks about when you fast, not if, and it’s replete with how fasting heals the body in so many different ways, not just physical but even spiritual.
Dr. Clum:
I think there’s an innate attraction to it too, because it’s amazing how much interest comes up when you talk about fasting. As Meredith mentioned, I started in New York. I started a master’s program, but I upgraded and I’m in a Ph.D. program now in health psychology, and one of the things we’re going over right now is addiction.
I, of course, related it back to the carb-addiction cycle and the endorphin cycle of eating and false hunger and all those types of things, and I put in the reference of fasting, the whole panel of the Ph.D. mentor level and stuff like that just erupts. Sometimes it’s in a very weird way, but sometimes in a very good way. The interest level is still there, and these are academics. Normally, I wouldn’t expect to get much rise out of them, so we’re even talking now about possibly redirecting the focus of the self-directed dissertations to include something on this. Everyone is finding it fascinating, so I think there’s an innate resonation there.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I agree, but for those watching, we always say that we are training doctors around the country in these modalities, so supervision is key. Something as simple as electrolytes, how to break the fast – these are important things that we’re getting more and more doctors to understand, but if we can get more doctors understanding these ancient healing strategies, I’ll tell you what, we can change a paradigm. That’s for darn sure. Like you said, Dr. Don, you can’t even mention the word fasting in some of those circles.
Dr. Clum:
Fast is a four-letter word and above that, it’s an f-word in those circles.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, for an f-word, you can’t use fasting. We’ve got to come up with another term, right? That’s fantastic. We’re the opposite. We think it’s a word that represents health and healing, and we’re trying to educate the population, 180 degrees opposite of what everyone thinks is where health comes from. It’s been a message I have taught for a long time. The world thinks fasting is dangerous or bad or whatever they think. There are a lot of myths, right? “You can’t do that. Your body is going to eat all its muscle.” It’s a myth.
Dr. Clum:
The flip side is you find out what everyone’s doing and then you just do the opposite.
Dr. Pompa:
Ah, that’s the 180 degree approach, Don, absolutely, man. Always, do 180 degrees opposite, and somehow you hit it right every time. Some takeaways, Don; it’s the liver, right.
Dr. Clum:
Yes, it’s the liver.
Dr. Pompa:
What about the fat in the liver and pancreas, the visceral fat? A lot of toxic issues are driving a lot of that, right? Exercise on an empty stomach – wait as long as you can before. Don’t just take all the whey protein right afterwards. It sails up the glucose and insulin. You and I are both believers in that, right? Vary it up, so resistive training; throw that in.
Dr. Clum:
Eat three meals a day.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s where you start, and then we can cut you down to two and intermittent fasting, but exactly. Take away the snacks. Don, you gave us a lot of gems. Thanks for sharing your story, and Meredith, thanks for sharing yours. We’ll have you back for sure.
Dr. Clum:
I hope so. We’ve got 487 people in our cohort right now going through this, and so hopefully in about 12 weeks, we’ll have a whole lot more to report.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely, we’ll keep in touch with that. Don, you’ve shared a lot, so thank you very much. Thanks Meredith.
Dr. Clum:
Thanks for having me.
Dr. Pompa:
Sign us off, Meredith; go ahead.
Meredith:
All right; well, thanks everyone. Dr. Clum you’re welcome information, we really appreciated all of those gems, as Dr. Pompa said today. Definitely keep us posted on the results and we’ll have you back soon.
Dr. Clum:
Thank you very much. Thanks so much for having me.
Meredith:
Thanks everyone, and take care and stay tuned next week when we will have Dr. Jason Fung, who you mentioned, Dr. Clum, in this episode today. He is an expert on fasting.
Dr. Clum:
He’s been very generous to me.
Meredith:
Awesome, I’m excited to have him on the show too.
Dr. Pompa:
Yep, and we’re going to keep hammering these experts at you, man, so you realize we’re not just crazy people out there doing crazy things. We know what we’re talking about. All right guys, we’ll see you.
Meredith:
Okay, take care.
