121: The Every Other Day Diet with Professor Krista Varady

Transcript of Episode 121: The Every Other Day Diet with Professor Krista Varady

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Special Guest, Professor Krista Varady

Meredith:
Hello, everyone and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 121. We're so excited to have you here. Today we have a very special guest along with Dr. Pompa, our resident cellular healing specialist, of course. Today joining us is Dr. Krista Varady. Dr. Krista Varady is a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and does a lot of work in intermittent fasting and has done a lot of interesting research. We know our listeners are very educated in fasting, don't we, Dr. Pompa. We've talked about it a lot on the show.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. Krista, thank you for joining us. We want to hear about your research and more of what's going on. You have a really different concept even what we talk a lot about. It's fasting every other day. We want to hear a little bit more about that and what some of your research shows. Let's just start there.

Meredith:
All right. Before we get started, let me jump in and tell you a little bit more about Krista. Sorry I didn't do that initially. Then we'll get started. Krista Varady, PhD, is an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her research focuses on the efficacy of alternate-day fasting for weight loss, maintenance, and cardio protection in obese adults.

Her work is funded by the NIH, American Heart Associated, International Life Sciences Institute, and the University of Illinois. She's published over 50 publications on this topic and is also the author of a book for the general public entitled The Every-Other-Day Diet. All right, Krista, without further ado, welcome to the show.

Dr. Varady:
Thank you so much for having me. You just want me to jump in and tell you a little bit about what I do?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you know because for us it's a little different. I'm sure you start most of the shows by going, what? What do you mean? Our viewers are kind of beyond that. We get fasting. We get that fasting every other day, yeah that's going to cause weight loss. We understand it. One of the things I always like to say is don't eat less, eat less often. Dr. Sears and I talked about that too. We get it. Let's hear a little bit more about your research because it's a little different approach than what we do. You do every other day. Let's talk about it.

-Technical Issue-

Dr. Varady:

I'm not sure. Sometimes I wear ear phones when I do — oh, now it's gone. Okay. Anyway, I do something called alternate day fasting so that involves a fasting where somebody eats about 500 calories as a lunch or a dinner and then it's alternated with what I call a feast day. Basically it's where people can eat whatever they want. They're kind of free to eat meals and snacks as they choose. The thing that people really like about alternate-day fasting is really every other day they just get to feel normal again.

A lot of people are doing this type of diet for weight loss and also just metabolic health improvements as well. A lot of people will start this diet when they failed previously with daily calorie restriction approaches because they find those things a little too rigid. They like the fact that every other day they can kind of just relax and socialize and eat normally with their families.

One of the key things we've found recently is that people don't binge on those feast days. You'd expect if someone's just having 500 calories on that off day or on the fast day I should say, you'd expect them to have a whole lot more to kind of compensate for that lack of calories on the previous day, so just eat a lot more on the feast day. We show that people don't binge, and they only eat about 10% more than they usually do.

Dr. Pompa:
It's interesting because something that I call diet variation, I talk about it in a lot of different articles and web casts, is the fact that I believe in a feast, at least one feast day a week where you eat a lot on purpose. Even when we do eat on an intermittent fasting day, I believe in eating a lot for dinner just because it reminds the body it's not starving. You're kind of doing that every other day. It's like if you're eating less, less, less, less, you're body eventually says uh-oh, I'm starving.

These feast days I believe imitate what our ancestors were forced to do at times. There was feast and there was famine. You're doing that. I do have this question though because our viewers may be a little different than the average person. A lot of our viewers have different struggles; hormonal struggles, health struggles, whatever's going on.

In many of them, even my own clients and the doctors watching their own clients, they hate the darn feast days. I'm saying, hey, do a feast day, and they struggle with the feast day because when they eat they don't feel well; it's food intolerances. They just feel more tired that day because their body has to process. Do you have people that complain about the feast day?

Dr. Varady:
The major thing that I hear that they're a lot happier on their fast day than they thought they'd be. The one thing that they didn't realize is the energy boost they get that day. A lot of people thought that they would have problems with concentrating, but they don't have that at all. They basically feel really alert, they can concentrate, focus, and have a lot of energy. I wouldn't say people complain about the feasting in particular, but they definitely do notice that their energy levels are lower on that days.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. I think that's probably even more for us, our sake, it's people that have more health challenges can notice some of the differences. I also have the opposite, Krista. I have people that struggle to fast even 14, 15 hours. I just had one. I had a client this morning, she was trying to fast 16, 17 hours. We have people measure their glucose and ketones to make sure their glucose is dropping, their ketones are rising. Hers weren't. Her glucose was dropping and her ketones were dropping. It was the worst scenario. Then there was a part where her glucose was actually rising and not dropping.

Again, we have these metabolically, very injured people. We're trying to get her body to do the right thing. When I interviewed Joe Mercola, Joe Mercola said he'd found that over 15 hours his glucose kept rising. Now he only fasts for less than 15 hours. An interesting episode because it's kind of similar. Joe is wearing a Dexcom where it looks at your glucose all day. He was able to kind of see when his glucose started to rise and realized he was probably in a catabolic state.

With our clients a lot of the times we just measure glucose and ketones in the morning, and we measure glucose and ketones before their first meal and make sure that the right things happen; glucose is dropping, ketones are rising. When we see this rise in glucose, then they're typically burning muscle into sugar. Interesting. Do you have people that struggle in the feast because maybe that's happening? I'm sorry, in the fast day.

Dr. Varady:
On the fast day, yeah. We've run about 600 to 700 people, typically obese people through various trials. I'd say almost all of them are poor at having problems in the first week and a half, so the first five fast days they find that adjustment period, kind of adjusting to that up-down pattern of eating. Pretty much everyone after a week and a half, they just get used to it and they actually really like it.

Dr. Pompa:
There's that normal, even two weeks that we see people struggle metabolically. We still monitor because when they don't come out, then we back down the time of the fast until where their glucose doesn't continue to rise. I've got to ask you this question too. Meredith, I think it was you that sent me the study on alternate-day fasting, at least in this study they were doing alternate day. The study basically was that women have more trouble than men. I know my answer to that. I told Meredith, “How do you respond to that study?” I bet you've seen it because I'm sure people sent it to you.

Dr. Varady:
I've actually never seen that study. Are you talking about just in terms of adherence to the fast day?

Dr. Pompa:
Meredith actually found the study. It was basically saying that women didn't lose the same weight as men and even metabolically they were losing muscle when they did lose weight as opposed to men. Am I summarizing that, Meredith?

Meredith:
They weren't responding as well hormonally.

Dr. Varady:
What's the study?

Meredith:
I can send you the link. I'd found it on PubMed awhile ago.

Dr. Varady:
Okay. We just recently published a link called Determinants of Weight Loss, Success with Alternate-Day Fasting. That's specifically the type of fasting we use. We actually found that women can actually adhere to it a little bit better than men, particularly women between the ages 50 to 65 tend to do the best and they lose the most weight. We just ran a large NIH sponsored study and found that postmenopausal women actually lost twice the amount of weight with a year of alternate-day fasting compared to premenopausal women and also men.

Dr. Pompa:
I'm a believer in it because I see what hormonally happens. This study like that, there was a few factors that I noted. First of all, women often times have more thyroid struggles. We're getting a lot of neurotoxic women that have thyroid hormone issues. It takes much longer oftentimes to fix that. When you're looking at a short term that they did in the studies, you're going to get a skewed response because I  know even personally when I start doing fasting with women it takes me longer oftentimes with these hormonally challenged cases, especially thyroid cases, to get them responding metabolically.

When we look at it shorter term like that, of course it's going to skew the study and then people think, oh. What I get is, oh, well, this isn't good for women. No, that's not the case because when we look at ancient cultures, women and men intermittently fasted. It's just the fact that there's different hormone challenges with women. Again, it's my argument of why you need to work with a coach and not just try to tackle these things on your own. That was my answer part to that study.

Meredith:
I'm wondering too with your research, Krista, are you offering dietary guidelines? During the fasting, the feasting days, just in general, are these participants in the studies supposed to adhere to a certain diet?

Dr. Varady:
We have our participants come in once a week for weigh ins, and then we also provide them with weekly one-on-one dietary counseling with the dieticians. We're really teaching them just kind of the basics of increase your fruit and vegetable intake, and lower sugar intake, and try to choose some lower fat options, and consume less processed foods, and cook more of that type of stuff. We do offer them usually about a 12-week pretty intensive program and dietary counseling.

Dr. Pompa:
The magic comes from the fasting, would you agree?

Dr. Varady:
I think so, yeah. I agree with you, definitely. We found that sometimes we'll have other groups also doing the same type of dietary counseling, but really the alternate-day fasting people tend to have better — basically we show that alternate-day fasting tends to have better decreases in insulin and insulin resistance compared to just people on a typical calorie-restricted diet. There is some type of magic to, I wouldn't use the word magic as a scientist, but there's definitely some type of benefit to fasting that seems to be better than just doing typical daily restriction.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree 100% because that's why I like to say don't eat less, eat less often. That way when you're eating, you're eating until full so the body doesn't think it's starving. Isn't that the key? Caloric restriction eventually fails because eventually the body thinks it's starving and it starts to lower its metabolic rate. You have to eat less and less and less until barely you're not eating and you're getting fatter. What have you found in your studies? You're a scientist. What have you found hormonally that's taking place in these fasting states?

Dr. Varady:
We haven't measured hormones in particular. What I tend to look at is weight loss. We also look at metabolic disease parameters. I guess we've measured adipokines, so basically hormones derived from fat cells. We've done that. We've also done ingestive behavior, so we've looked at peptides released from the gut. Typically, just to give you our major findings, we find that people lose about one to three pounds per week. Bigger people will lose more, obviously.

We see really nice decreases in triglycerides. As I mentioned before, there's really nice decreases in insulin, insulin resistance, blood pressure. Those tend to kick in after about four weeks of intermittent fasting. In terms of hormonal changes, we see a decrease in leptin, but that tends to be pretty common if you're just losing weight. I think probably the most interesting hormone findings we've found so far are the changes in gut peptides. We actually find that people, they're not hungry on those fast days, and they actually start over the course of the trial to become fuller on those fast days.

We've seen increases in PYY, which is a hormone that is basically associated with fullness. We've also shown that hunger just stays low on those days. I think a lot of people are scared of doing these diets because they're scared that they're just going to be hungry all the time. What they don't realize is that the body after about a week and a half, two weeks kind of adjusts so it's not such a painful approach. Basically it becomes pretty easy to stick to those fast days both subjectively and hormonally.

Dr. Pompa:
I've found that clinically to be true. You're on one end and I'm on a clinical end, and it works. The one thing that I've read in many studies is just the rise in growth hormone. The hormone sensitivity, meaning that the cells hear the hormones better during these fasting states. We do get the growth hormone rise. I believe it's all the adaptation of the bodies wanting to survive, that it does these hormonal things to maintain its muscle, to maintain what it needs to survive, if you will, to make it very simple. They're going to see the shift in hormones sensitivity and even these anabolic hormones. Those are the studies that I think originally interested me.

Dr. Varady:
We've measured IGF-1 as well, insulin-like growth factor 1, which is related to growth hormone, obviously. With that we haven't seen any changes. Very interesting.

Meredith:
I'm interested too. What does this look like for a week in your book with the every other day? It's every other day is 500 calories and then one day a week is the feast day. I just wanted to clarify what exactly it looks like.

Dr. Varady:
It's really every other day is the feast day. Basically it's feast day, fast day, feast day, fast day. A lot of people choose to kind of alter that a little bit because it is hard to have those fast days on the weekend when you want to socialize with people, etc. I have a Facebook page called the Every-Other-Day Diet Facebook page where a lot of people write in and talk about how they're altering the diet to make it a little easier with their lifestyle. A lot of people will do the fast days, the 500 calories on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and that seems to work just as well. That kind of leaves the weekend open for them to socialize.

Meredith:
Do you suggest with those 500 calorie fast days that they eat within a compressed time window? Is there a time that you lay out that is effective?

Dr. Varady:
Oh, yeah. That's a great question. We originally had everyone eat the 500 calories as a lunch between 12 and 2 just because scientifically we wanted to standardize it between subjects. A lot of people were complaining about that where they were saying, “You know, I don't want to have it as a lunch. I would much prefer to have that fasting meal as a dinner where I can socialize with people or eat with my family.”

We finished a study that was published in the journal Obesity, and we looked at basically having the meal spread out through the day, so having a couple hundred calories as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and also compared that to a standard lunch group, and then also a group that consumed it as dinner. The results were it really didn't matter when you had that meal. You can actually scatter it throughout the day a little bit or you can have it at either lunch or dinner, and you will see the same effects for weight loss and cardiovascular improvement.

Dr. Pompa:
I believe that, again, coming from a clinical standpoint, I've tried it different ways. I have people that eat more lunch and less dinner, and I've had the opposite. The big dinner eaters and the less lunch, and it works. Then there ‘s Joe Mercola. He eats kind of that whole time in that window when he eats. I've seen it work every one of those ways. I totally agree with that finding, no doubt.

Meredith:
Before we get to that, we were talking about your initial research and how this in the first place was with mice and those studies. Could you share a little bit on what you're finding with them?

Dr. Varady:
Oh, sure. I started studying alternate-day fasting about ten years ago or so. It was when I was doing a post at UC Berkeley. I kind of fell into this actually because we were trying to disassociate the effects of fasting versus weight loss on cancer risk. We wanted to take mice and we wanted them to not lose any weight, but fast. We thought, well how do we do that? We thought, okay, well why don't we let them eat whatever they want on one day and then very little on the next day so that way they get to fasting but then they can kind of compensate for the lack of food on their fast day by eating more on the feast day. No matter what we did, they just kept on losing weight.

Our experiments kind of failed in the sense that we never got to tease apart weight loss versus fasting, but then from that I thought, well, weight loss isn't always a bad thing. I can test this out in humans and see if they also lose weight and see if there are any positive metabolic effects. That's what I started about eight years ago at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Dr. Pompa:
That's incredible. As a matter of fact, we interviewed on the show Dr. Thomas Seyfried, who wrote the book Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. We talked all about short fast, long fast, different fast. One conclusion was there is benefit to different types of fasting, even the block fast where you fast longer versus shorter. His findings with cancer, talk a little bit more about the fasting with the cancer. Have you done any other studies? Did you switch that one up? What was your finding in that study?

Dr. Varady:
What we found, this is just in mice, but we did find benefits for basically decreasing cancer risk. We were looking at cell proliferation rates, so kind of cell turnover rates, which is a cancer risk parameter. We found that it decreased. Basically in the mouse the tissue would be similar to skin, breast, prostate. Just basically various tissues of the body that cells were turning over at a slower rate, which could be indicative of less cancer risk, so kind of slowing aging and cancer risk potentially.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what's amazing is I'm just sitting here thinking, first of all our topic here so opposite of what the medical community would even understand. Do you understand? The word fasting just sends up red flags right off the bat. When we're talking about multiple different ways, I fast daily for at least 18 hours. Then I eat my bigger meal. I've done it this way too. I've done it where I've eaten very little a day throughout the week and then I feast. I feast on healthy foods, but I feast. I eat a lot on the weekend, maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

There's so many ways to do it, but it's the fasting. It's these periodic fasts that really is what's causing these amazing changes, that we're seeing animals live longer and people live longer healthier. I love talking to the scientists like yourself because we really get the fact that we're able to measure parameters that we know cause people to live healthier; downgraded insulin levels, it's a fact.

We're seeing these things adjust and we know that this is really dealing with the epidemic of why people are sick. We're telling people, hey. These intermittent fasts, this is what does it. You're talking about cancer cells. Cancer is running rampant. How much cancer can we avoid if people just started doing the art of fasting the way we're talking about. How much? It's remarkable.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah. Sorry, was that a question?

Dr. Pompa:
It's a question just to hear your comments because just hearing your results from that study, we ponder the fact that we could be preventing cancer; of course, diabetes and all the major killers from just doing this fasting.

Dr. Varady:
Absolutely. I haven't done any of the cancer-related parameters basically since I was working in mice. We definitely saw beneficial effects there. In humans I've really moved towards heart disease and diabetes, looking at whether or not we can basically even reverse type 2 diabetes. That's a grant that I recently wrote, so I'm looking into that. I think there's a really major power to just having an absence of food in your body for fair amounts. You're just giving your body a break, letting it reset, letting it rebuild itself. Constantly eating all the time or just always having sugars in our system, it's not great. We're never giving our bodies a break, and I think it's problematic.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn't agree more. Seyfried talks a lot about, and so do I, about apoptosis being caused by the body itself because of the innate intelligence, meaning autophagy where the body is getting rid of the bad cells before the good cells.

Dr. Varady:
We haven't studied that, but I think apoptosis really just means —

Dr. Pompa:
I'm talking about caused by the body, meaning that innate intelligence is going, hey, let's get rid of these bad cells.

Dr. Varady:
There is some research. I haven't done it myself, but there is somebody named Dr. Walter Longo. He really looks more at the aging and cancer side of intermittent fasting. I would definitely recommend talking to him as well if you're interested more in the cancer side. That's Longo, I believe he's at San Diego. He's looked at a lot of those mechanisms and parameters that I would definitely recommend to people who want to learn more about that. He's definitely seen protective effects for sure in mice, increased longevity, etc.

Dr. Pompa:
It's remarkable. There's more and more studies showing even just a one-day fast, what happens. Autolytic behavior occurs. The body starts getting rid of these bad cells. Obviously that's effective in cancer. Do you know Thomas Seyfried? Have you met him yet?

Dr. Varady:
No. Is he a clinician or researcher?

Dr. Pompa:
He's a scientist out of — where's he out of, University of —

Meredith:
Boston.

Dr. Pompa:
Boston.

Dr. Varady:
I recognize the name, but what kind of researches does he do? Obesity related?

Dr. Pompa:
Cancer research, I mean years and years. He wrote a book called Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. You would enjoy his book. For the average person it's a little heavy, but you would tear it apart. Hey, Meredith. Connect Thomas and Krista. I'm very into connecting the science minds. I want him to know what you're doing, and I want you to know what Thomas is doing. He does more block fast, whereas you and I are talking more about intermittent types of fasts. He believes in both. I think you need to share your research. I think that would be good.

Dr. Varady:
Sounds good.

Dr. Pompa:
Pick up his book, Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. He's a very bright guy. I'll be attending a conference in Orlando. I think it's September or October. My schedule gets mixed up. He will be there and some other cancer doctors, and he's going to be talking about fasting. Hey, Meredith, I'll send her the link to that. That's maybe another conference you need to go to.

Dr. Varady:
Is it the American Cancer Conference?

Dr. Pompa:
I don't remember the name of who's putting it out. Like I said, there are two that are flip-flopped in my brain. We'll send you the link. Mercola, myself, Seyfried, Dominique D'Agostino, we're going to be there. I think it'd be something you'd be interested in for sure.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah, great. For sure.

Meredith:
I'll send you the link.

Dr. Pompa:
Moving on in this topic, you had mentioned heart disease. You had mentioned diabetes. Are you doing any studies around other specific conditions?

Dr. Varady:
It just takes so long to run these studies. They're really long as well. Most of them are about a year long. They've been taking us awhile. My focus in research has mainly been heart disease and diabetes, so that's what we've been doing. I've also really been looking at adherence and whether or not people can exercise during these types of diets. We find that it goes back to people have a lot of energy on those fast days. It's absolutely fine to do exercising on those days.

Just a couple different adherence issues like can you have your regular diet during those days? Will you still experience those metabolic benefits if you don't change all of your food intake? Obviously, it's better to consume healthier foods, less processed foods, but we've noticed that fasting works even if people don't make dramatic changes to the types of foods they eat. That was interesting as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. We're dealing with healthy people, so I don't want them to misread this, but whether someone ate a pizza or whether someone ate a bunch of vegetables, the glucose goes up. The benefit is on those fast days. [28:46] challenge, that's another story on eating some of those other foods and if you have intolerances. However, the fast days is where the amazing hormonal shift occurs. Tell us a little bit more about your findings with heart disease and diabetes.

Dr. Varady:

With heart disease in general we see all the major risk parameters improve, so cholesterol levels, the bad cholesterol tends to go down, the good cholesterol HDL goes up, triglycerides go down. We've seen improvements in LDL particle size. It's a little counterintuitive, but for those people that don't know it, you actually want your LDL particles to increase in size because it means if they're larger, fluffier particles, they are less likely to embed in the blood vessels. We see that with fasting, that it tends to increase.

Dr. Pompa:

Absolutely. I'm not a believer in total cholesterol causing heart attacks. I'm a believer in particles as being the problem. The size and the number. Have you noticed a change on the number of particles? The size gets better. I see it all the time. What about the number of particles?

Dr. Varady:
We actually only have measured the size so far. The number, it's a little harder. It's just a much more expensive procedure, so we haven't done it yet, but we're hoping to do it in our next study.

Dr. Pompa:
What do you feel is more important, the size or the number?

Dr. Varady:
I really don't know. From the review articles I've read, it seems like most people are leaning towards the size are really important. You can have a lot of LDL cholesterol, but if they're all really big fluffy particles, then it seems like it's fine because they're not going to become oxidized and become plaques from what I understand.

Dr. Pompa:
How come the sciences get this? I've been preaching this for years, cholesterol is not the problem, it's the particles. Why isn't the medical community picking up on it when more and more scientists are speaking exactly what you're speaking?

Dr. Varady:
There's the National Cholesterol Education Program, which is basically the doctor's manual to how you treat cholesterol. LDL is mentioned in there, but you're right, it's just kind of overlooked. I wanted to touch base too on people being really scared of fasting. You mentioned that before in the medical community thinking. I think it's just really anti-American to withhold food. I think that's what the thing is. I don't think people are against the research or anything, but I think just psychologically and even socially it's just not something that you're supposed to do. We're in this land of abundance, so I think it's really hard for people to even just understand that.

I was mentioned in this New York Times article called Fasting Diets are Gaining Acceptance. That was out about a month or two ago. It was really interesting seeing it. It was a great article. It mentioned a lot of the researchers in fasting. The comments, if you read through the comments just from the general public, I do a lot of interviews. I get a lot of comments. Most of them are kind of positive, but the comments from that where you're a really massive journal where everyone's reading it, it's crazy. It's harsh. People are like, this is insanity. Why are you publishing? Why are you even mentioning this?

Dr. Pompa:
It's true. It is taboo. I started this show by saying that. It's just not mainstream. They can say what they want. It works. I know it's counterintuitive, but it works. We live in a land where breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It should be the biggest meal of the day, and we're saying to people, “Don't eat breakfast.” I mean, oh, my gosh.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah. All the research on breakfast was actually sponsored by Kellogg's, and it all had to do with children and cognitive development. It didn't have to do with obesity, and it really just had to do with kids skipping breakfast and not doing as well in school. Fine, I think kids should eat breakfast before they go to school. In terms of weight loss, recent large scale studies have shown that people that just naturally don't eat breakfast consume 200 to 300 calories less per day than people that do eat breakfast.

It's also been shown that eating breakfast does not boost your metabolism. I don't even know where this information came from. All of this stuff of if you don't have breakfast your body's going to fall apart is just ridiculous. It's not based on any scientific evidence.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn't agree more. It's absolutely silly. What about diabetics. We only have a little bit of time left, and we appreciate your time [33:23]. What about diabetes? Again, counterintuitive, my gosh. A diabetic going without food. I mean, come on, Krista.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah. Admittedly I'm not sure if type 1 diabetics should be doing this fast approach. Have you done fasting in your type 1 diabetic patients?

Dr. Pompa:
Intuitively I said, “I don't know. They probably would really struggle.” Ironically enough, it's like they seem to struggle in the beginning, and then it seems like they can do it. Again, we've done some intermittent fasting daily with them. It seems like it stabilizes. Again, I'm not putting this scientific-clinically I've seen it. Can everybody do it that's type 1? The answer is no, but I have seen many type 1's very successful.

Dr. Varady:
Great. We've traditionally looked at people with pre-diabetes, and we found that people that were highly insulin resistant became completely insulin sensitive after about a month or two. It's incredible. These are people that it's right before their diagnosis of type 2, but they're basically just back to normal after just doing this for a couple months. It's amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
Have you got any ground roads into mainstream medicine, hospitals doing this for diabetics and heart disease patients?

Dr. Varady:
I am contacted by a lot of clinicians that use it their weight loss clinics or diabetes clinics. It's kind of scattered all over the country, but I would say on a major scale, no.

Dr. Pompa:
What a shame. Well, Meredith, you probably have a couple questions, and I know Dr. Krista has limited time here.

Meredith:
Yeah, just a few more minutes. I was just curious too as you were kind of talking about the social component of this. Did you address that in your book, and what did you say to that?

Dr. Varady:
I think that the social component is really you just need to let people be flexible with things. The thing that we say is it's fine to skip a fast day here and there just as long as it doesn't derail your diet. If you prefer to just fast on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that's fine. We just want people to be able to stick to it. We don't want them to see it as being such a large barrier. Basically just make it easily incorporated into their lifestyle. A lot of the stuff is be flexible with yourself but make sure you get back on the fasting train or whatever you want to call it, even if you skip a couple days.

Meredith:
I love it. Just making it a lifestyle, which is what, Dr. Pompa, you do. I do as well. It's what we believe in. I love your message too in your book because it's so doable for a lot of people that think, oh, gosh. This seems too overwhelming, the fasting. Especially when we discuss block fasting. Every other day and making it a part of your lifestyle. It doesn't have to be every other day, just easing into it, but still utilizing fasting and getting a lot of the benefits. You don't have to be so strict about it.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
We're doing the exact same thing. My fast days, it's the days I get the most done in my busiest days. I look at the clock and realize, gosh, I didn't even eat. It really is that easy once you get into the practice of it. Message for this show, the magic is in the fasting. There's the science. Krista, you're bringing the science. Thank you so much for your dedication to bring us science because we are going up against what I call 180 degree solution here, meaning that we're bringing a message 180 degrees opposite of what everybody else is talking about. We better have the science to back it. Thank you for that. All right, I'll turn it back over to you, Meredith.

Meredith:
Awesome. Well, thanks, Dr. Pompa, and thank you so much, Dr. Krista, for joining Cellular Healing TV. It was a pleasure to have you. We'll look forward to your research in the future, so keep us posted on your findings.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, if you get more findings, we'll have you back on another show after studies. We can promote your studies, so get it out there because we reach the doctor world here as well.

Dr. Varady:
Oh, great. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was great speaking with you guys.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

Meredith:
Where can our viewers find out more about you and your research?

Dr. Varady:
I would say the best link would probably be The Every-Other-Day Diet Facebook page. I post stuff pretty much every other day, just fasting research and updates on my research as well. I try to answer some key questions. The book Every-Other-Day Diet, you can buy it on Amazon. It's got recipes and comprehensive review of my research and how to do the diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Great stuff. Thank you.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Thanks, Dr. Krista. Thanks, everyone for watching, and we'll see you next time.