157: Diet Variation

Transcript of Episode 157: Diet Variation

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Meredith Dykstra

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode No. 157. We’ve got our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Daniel Pompa, on the line. Today, hey, it’s just you and I. We don’t have any guest experts here, so you’re back to being the expert.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m all you have. I’m all you have.

Meredith:
I am excited about that. It’s funny. It’s been a while that it’s just us, but Dr. Pompa, you had asked me to schedule this show because we have a pretty important topic that we want to discuss today, and we’re going to be delving into diet. Now, as all of you know, there are lots of diets out there that are tooted to be the best diet for your health. There is the vegan diet, the Paleo diet, macrobiotic diet, which I had subscribed to in the past. Oh, my gosh, there’s so many diets out there that are telling you they have the answer to fixing all of your health challenges. We’re going to delve into maybe what is the answer today. What the solution is to finding the right diet for you. Dr. Pompa, you have some pretty interesting answers, so I’m excited to delve into this topic a little bit more.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. Yeah, when we look at the debate, which diet is best? I mean, the vegan people would say the vegan diet’s the best, right? The Paleo people, the Paleo diet is the best. What if they’re all right? Look, I coined something called “diet variation,” and I’m going to say aka feast-famine cycles. It’s really something that grew into something even more than I had thought, meaning the importance of it to people’s health.

Just as where this fits in, we talk about a multi-therapeutic approach, and this is what a growing number of doctors are doing now. I always like to put it into context of the three-legged stool. You have certain genes that are getting turned on. That’s why we don’t feel well. That’s why we’re developing certain diseases, and a lot of my cellular healing work applies there. Then the other part is is that we have certain stressors that turn on our genes, and the cellular detox work applies there. Certain chemical stressors turn on genes. We know that.

Then the last leg is the microbiome that we hear so much about, right? We’ve learned how much this applies to health. I always say, you’re not going to fix a microbiome or a gut just by adding probiotic, if it were only so simple. When we look and we utilize these ancient healing strategies that we can learn from from ancient cultures, that’s really how as a growing group of doctors we’re fixing this microbiome issue and the gut issue, so today’s topic applies in this leg of the stool of the microbiome. How diet variation, when I say that word, Meredith, most people think I’m talking about eating a variety of food. That’s what they think, all right? It’s not that at all.

Meredith:
That could be a variety of food, yeah, of course.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. That could be diet variation, right? I mean, that’s so far—but it really is more important than that. It’s utilizing things that we don’t have to do anymore. Meaning today we don’t have to go into times of ketosis, but moving in and out of ketosis is key.

Now, I’m going to make some ketosis people angry. I did this weekend. I had the privilege with Joe Mercola and myself speaking at the Low Carb USA event. I’ll tell you, if I didn’t have Joe go on ahead of me and say how much diet variation changed his life, okay—because it did. Joe was in ketosis, and him and I went on a walk. He said, “I’m losing muscle,” and some other things were happening. I said, “Oh, here’s the answer.”

Meredith:
How long had he been in ketosis and was not getting results?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No. He was getting results, but what happened was it started going the other direction on him. He started to, like I said, lose some muscle, etc. Just some things were happening. I explained to Joe that, basically, it’s because your insulin is getting so low, and a couple things happen. When insulin goes low, you actually can fire up gluconeogenesis in the liver. Insulin, actually, what it does is one of its most important functions is it actually stops glucose production in the liver. When insulin goes really low, you can actually increase insulin, but actually, people don’t understand that.

That’s one thing. However, I also explained that the body can go into almost a starvation mode because the insulin goes so low, and therefore, that can affect thyroid hormone. That can affect other hormones. It could affect a lot of things in the body. By throwing in a carb day, a higher feast day as we call it, higher carbs, higher food in general, higher caloric intake, you can change that dynamically or dramatically. Sure enough, it worked.

We were at Low Carb USA. Joe told that story. He said in his new book, Fat for Fuel, which is coming out in the spring—I was blessed to be one of the editors, peer reviewed. It’s a peer-reviewed book. There was eight really bright people that were able to peer review that. I’m not putting myself in that category with these guys, but I was blessed enough to be one of the peer reviewers of the book. I talked in the chapter, and we talked about feast-famine cycling. Joe gave me credit on that. We were there and the low-carb people and the ketone people, man, they didn’t want to hear it.

Meredith:
You’re at the Low Carb event telling them to eat carbs once in a while? Uh-oh!

Dr. Pompa:
They were a little up in arms about it. Needless to say, we knew what we knew, and we stuck to our guns.

Meredith:
The proof is in the pudding, right?

Dr. Pompa:
What’s that?

Meredith:
Yeah. I just said, well, the proof’s in the pudding. If you’re eating a very low-carb diet for a long period of time and stop getting results, then we have to reassess the situation. Think, okay, if I keep doing the same thing and I’m not getting the results that I’m looking for, then something is amiss. I need to change my strategy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You’re right, exactly. There was a remarkable amount of people there who struggled to be in ketosis, or they were in ketosis, and they weren’t losing weight anymore or at all, even though they were in. I talked even about how toxicity plays a major role in why you don’t lose weight or why you can’t get into ketosis. I actually started it by one of the ways how I discovered this. I talked about some of these people that are in ketosis, or they’re struggling to get into ketosis, or they’re in and out, and they’re not getting the result.

I said, well, let’s just go back to a regular Cellular Healing Diet. Let’s bring your carbs up to a 100, 150 grams of carbs. That’s still a low-carb diet, but it’s not ketosis by any means, right? In today’s standards, it’s definitely considered a low-carb diet. In my world, I would say it’s a really normal moderate-carbohydrate diet at least. Anyways, we put them back in on it that way, and all of a sudden, they start losing weight. It’s like, well, that’s odd. I had them on that diet, and they weren’t losing weight. I tried to move them in ketosis for three or four months. It really wasn’t happening.

Moved them back into the same diet they were on. All of a sudden, they start losing weight. It stops though, and then we realized, okay, it stopped. Let me shift them back into ketosis again. Let’s see what happened. Lo and behold, this time around they were fat adapted in two weeks, very efficient now using fat, losing weight again. I repeated that a few times. Then I had some of our doctors do a similar thing, and they got the same results.

What I had determined was the magic was in the switch. Certain hormonal things happen when we have those major dietary changes that creates—the body’s trying to adapt. Through that adaptation, things happen that we don’t even clearly understand yet, hormonally, etc., that we saw this amazing change. That got me curious, and it led down some other roads. That really is monthly diet variation where we’re changing diets, or here’s another way of putting it, seasonal diet variation. What if we put someone in ketosis for three months, and then moved them out for three or four months. Is there anything else that substantiate that? That’s called seasonal diet variation.

Maybe we can lay it out. Take them through. I’ll you do it, the different ones. Then you can ask me questions around it, but that’s what got me thinking in this area.

Meredith:
To explain and define diet variation, we’re varying our diets. Often times, you’re using either the Cellular Healing Diet or the ketogenic diet, and shifting back and forth between those two diets because those are the diets you found to be most successful for most people in decreasing inflammation, balancing our hormones, losing weight. We’re varying between those two diets typically. We’re adding in feast and famine cycles which we’ll delve into a little bit more to further promote cellular adaptation and variation. Then we’re varying the foods as well and the meal timings. There’s variation in literally every aspect of what we’re eating, when we’re eating it, how we’re eating it. I mean, there’s just variation in really every aspect of consumption in diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. One of the other things was is this; we know that when someone’s also in this state of ketosis for a long time—I mentioned Joe Mercola’s experience. We added the feast day in, increasing his carbs. He noticed that, even when he did that, his glucose actually would drop after he ate a carbohydrate meal. How is that possible? We explain that. The point is is that we do get that major drop often times in glucose, even after a carbohydrate meal.

I think one of the big things is this; we added in a carb day. This is diet variation where maybe five days a week we’re doing ketosis. Then we’re adding in this feast day where we’re actually eating more and eating more carbohydrates. Okay? Then we vary it even more. We take another day of the week and we fast. We go dinner-to-dinner and fast, well, 23 hours, right? We have feast and famine going on in the same week, and then five days of a very low-carb ketosis diet. That’s weekly diet variation.

Then I talked about seasonal diet variation where we’re literally being in a diet for three, four months perhaps and then shifting the diet completely. However, even in a ketotic state, I think there’s major benefit to adding in these feast days and famine days. Now, let me explain why I think, okay, what’s happening. The body eventually thinks it’s starving. That’s what happens. I mean, technically, when you’re in a state of ketosis, the body mimics that fasting state, so when you’re in it long enough, it could have a tendency to think it’s starving, right?

One of those things I always say is, when you eat, you have to eat a big enough meal just to remind the body it’s not starving, but when that insulin continues to go down, it could take on starvation plans, if you will, or adaptations. One of which is this; the body is in ketosis. The majority of the fuel of the cell is fat, right? Cells can use glucose and fat. In ketosis, we’re making the cells use fat mostly as its energy source, 95% at least, right? Energy comes from fat.

Therefore, the body is so intelligent it says wait a minute. If this is my fuel, I want to conserve it. The body’s always trying to just survive. That’s its number one thing to do. Therefore, because famine cycles can come, then I better start holding onto this fat that’s so precious better. I better become more efficient at burning it. One of the things that it will do is it will even genetically just block the insulin receptors. It’s not insulin resistance like a diabetic. The DNA will literally blunt the receptor, and then be able to store a little bit more fat.

The irritating part is that the fat is stored typically where you don’t want it. I store it right at the bottom of my belly. Women will store right where they don’t want it on their butt or legs. You know the story. The point is that here’s what happens. When we remind the body it’s not starving and to go ahead and have the freedom to burn the fat, when we do that feast day, now all of a sudden the body goes, okay, we’re good. Let’s burn fat, so let’s become more efficient at fat burning.

Now it starts burning up your fat again, which is amazing. You feel that energy surge, and you now are tapping into those fat stores again. You become a more efficient fat burner again. You’re able to kick in the efficiency just by biohacking the body’s survival skill, really. Throwing food at it in an abundant way just tells the body A-Okay. We’re good. We have plenty of fuel. Go ahead and burn the fat, and it does. It’s really cool that it works like that.

Another example, sometimes people do better, especially thyroid people, because you need insulin to convert your stored T4 hormone to T3. If insulin gets really low, it’ll start messing that up a little bit too. Throwing in two, even three feast days a week works for some people more. They have these higher carbohydrates three days a week and then really low on the other days and even a fasting day or two. I like two or three fasting days a week. I like to go 24 hours at least 2 or 3 times a week, and sometimes I do 2 feast days. You can see I really vary my diet weekly.

Then, of course, right now, seasonally I’m doing this. In the summer, I was probably around 100 grams of carbs on average in the summer, and in the winter, now I am fully in ketosis. I’m experimenting with something new. This is fun because I’m really efficient in fat adapted. I realized, when I went back into ketosis, I was in ketosis in two, three days. I mean, just like that, which normally would take three weeks, right, but because I’m so efficient, I realized I was in. I was just in Florida for a week. Purposely came out of ketosis. I was out for one week. I came back, and literally, within a day, I was back into ketosis, so now I’m back in ketosis. I’m looking at even varying it like that where maybe I’m in ketosis for two weeks, and I go purposefully out for a week.

I don’t know. I mean, put it this way. There is magic here in the adaptation. I believe it’s optimizing hormones. I believe that there’s so much that happens that we don’t even understand with this diet variation so pretty cool. I probably just created more questions than I even—so you have to try to figure out what questions they would have, Meredith, to make this simple.

Meredith:
Right. Yeah. I think that the definition makes more sense now. You’ve clearly explained the why behind it, the reasoning and the importance of it, and a lot of anecdotal evidence as well. I think it makes so much sense from an ancestral perspective as well. Just when we look at our ancestors where food wasn’t always consistent, they couldn’t eat like we do or three meals a day and snacks. They couldn’t just go and buy food so readily. Their eating schedules were much less consistent.

It really makes sense that their bodies were made to adapt. When they were able to feast, their body could just relax, and oh, I can trust you. I don’t need to hang onto this fat anymore. Then they would get leaner, and their bodies would adapt from a cellular level because of that. Then during times of famine too, their bodies became efficient at burning fat when they were in ketosis, so they could have those stores and energy to get them through those challenging famine times. I think just diet variation makes such sense from an ancestral perspective. That’s clearly why it works so well, in my opinion.

To get down into the nitty-gritty of it, we’ve got the what. Now we have the why, but now we need the how, the implementation. Dr. Pompa, you mentioned a rule you have, the 5-1-1 rule, and I think that’s a really awesome strategy for a lot of people to be able to implement. You wrote about it in your ketosis article on drpompa.com, so you can check that article out if you want a little bit more in-depth explanation of that. I like how you’re explaining that it’s possible to vary that as well. Instead of the 5-1-1 rule of five days on the ketogenic diet, one day fasting and one day feasting, that alternation where perhaps four days keto and three days feasting or three days fasting and one day feasting. There’s just such beautiful magic variation in that.

You mentioned a little bit about what works best for some people. Do you want to delve into it more, maybe some people are watching with different conditions, as to what you would you suggest of some other kinds of conditions work better with more carb days and if there may be better for women to have more carbohydrates? If you can delve into that a little bit more with conditions?

Dr. Pompa:
I alluded to thyroid, but I would say low adrenal people too. They seem to do better with at least two carb days, higher carb days, feast days a week. Let me be clear. I think that, though, you get—you want to become as fat adapted as you can be. I mean, meaning that some people just aren’t going to be totally in ketosis where they feel like they’re really in this fat burning mode. I always say give it a few months, maybe two months at least, and then throw in the variations. I mean, some people can do it within a month because they adapt much quicker. Then I would start throwing in the variations where it’s either two feast days a week, even try three, and again, experimenting with even more—maybe a week of higher carbohydrates. When I say higher carbohydrates, let’s be clear, healthy carbohydrates. I think this is what people always want, right?

Meredith:
The pizza pie and fries and all that, come on, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to say this, though. Remember when we interviewed [Kristin] Varaday? Remember that? She is the scientist that wrote the book, Every-Other-Day Fasting, right? By the way, what they were doing is just—they were fasting people for a day, and then they were just putting them back on a Standard American Diet, which you and I were cringing, right? She said, “Yeah. Okay, but it worked. People still lost weight.”

Meredith:
Still getting result.

Dr. Pompa:
She said, “People still lost more weight by that variation than just doing one or the other diet.” I said to her, “Krista, why?” She said, “Well, I think it’s just adaptations that occur in the body.” Bingo! That’s exactly right. We don’t completely understand it, but forcing the change is actually where the magic lies.

Okay. This is what people really want I think. Okay, so what do I eat on my high-carb days, right? How about sweet potatoes? How about more berries; more shakes with more berries, right? Maybe that’s the day you can have a little bit of honey, right? Just some of those little treats that you would love.

Meredith:
A little curds, a little maple syrup, some special treats, yes, and it’s so fun too. Working with people, don’t you find that it’s so much more sustainable when people are able to implement a feast day because it’s so fun, and they can create healthy variations of some of their favorite foods? Maybe they can do a cauliflower mac and cheese, or a coconut flour pizza crust, or have plantains, or a maple syrup dessert. Bring that joy back in having some really special treat food that sometimes people feel like they’ve missed out on for many years or months when they’ve been trying to follow such a rigid diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Ultimately, most who people watch our show, right, I mean, they struggle with staying on a diet. I mean, they look at you and I, and they may get mad because we’re like this all the time, but think about it. When people have some freedom—and we’ve even done some interviews with food addiction. He says no. The best thing to do is give yourself planned days actually works even with people with food addiction. We know that this is going to help people stay on a better diet.

Look at these foods that I’m telling people to eat, right? You can eat more legumes in your diet. You can eat more berries, healthy fruits. You can eat more root vegetables, beets. Make more smoothies. I mean, these are healthy foods, right? We know this too.

Meredith:
They’re a pre-cooked food.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Some of the science is showing this too. By bringing in these foods periodically, it helps our microbiome. Remember, this is in the category of ancient healing for the microbiome. I found research with the American Indians showing that their summer diet versus their winter diet and I’ll talk a little bit about that was magic for changing their microbiome. It was a big part, they were saying—in this article, they were saying—because this is really what was one of the big things for preventing diabetes, which we know the American Indians are very prone to diabetes and heart disease, but this variation and how it affected their microbiome they believe was a critical component to avoiding this in their culture. They’re not getting it now.

One of the things that was said was—I have some quotes that I wrote down which I thought were good. It said “the more toward an all-year-around abundance of food in many populations may have caused overconsumption at times when the human metabolism otherwise would have benefited from more caloric restriction and/or greater insulin sensitivity.” What they were saying in here is that they believe this is causing disease because we’re in this constant food abundance all the time, and that went into another article, and I presented this at my seminar. I just want to show it real fast, if you don’t mind here. This was an amazing article because—here it is. I’m going to click on it. Okay, so the article was—sorry. I thought I had it. Oh, gosh, I thought I had it in this PowerPoint.

I’ll find it as we speak, but anyways, it was a—oh, here it is. I found it. I found it, great. Okay. It says, “Diet, individual responsiveness in cancer prevention.” Okay? This is basically the abstract. I’ll read a piece of the abstract, “beyond consideration of genetic polymorphisms.” Okay, so beyond some of the genetic stuff, “the last half century has brought stark changes in lifestyle that departs from normal diurnal cycles of periodic fluctuations in food availability.” Just stop right there.

What it’s saying is is that, basically, we are stuck in a feast mode, and this is potentially causing problems. “Thus, modern times may be characterized by being constantly in a feast environment. The cellular consequences may be an increase in risk for several diseases, including cancer.” In this article here, they are basically saying that they’re finding that the fact that we’re stuck in a feast mode all the time in modern day society is actually leading to disease. I couldn’t agree more. Now, in this article, they’re talking about cancer. In this particular article that I was referring, the American Indians, they were talking about diabetes and heart disease being prevented by forcibly moving in and out of these different diet cycles. The Indians in the winter ate a diet of meats, and I even wrote down what they were eating because I did this homework.

I actually went to Wyoming and researched this topic. Elk, deer, antelope were the mainstays of their diet in the winter. The women would trap small game, typically, and the men would go out hunting. In the spring, they often times—or even in the late winter, they ran out of food, forced fasting. It forced a fast. Early spring, they were in between food supplies. The Hunza people, which is completely another culture, there’s something called starvation spring where they would fast every spring. Then guess what happened in the summer? The American Indians now would start gathering berries, fruits, amaranth, wild onion, rice grass, dandelion, inner bark of the trees, different roots, root vegetables. Their carbohydrate intake soared, actually.

Now, in this, they talked about how getting more sun in the summer, exposed to more sun actually helped them with the higher carbohydrate. It made them more insulin sensitive, which means they could handle a higher carbohydrate diet, right? It also talked about in the winter, the lack of sun. Actually, how the higher fats would help them. Now we’re making an argument, even for seasonally, perhaps we should be varying our diet. Okay, so food, seasons—anyways, I’m bringing up a lot of points.

Look, I made evidence from science saying, hey, this could be—and I have many other articles here. Even with MS and how diet variation really helped with this. They said that just regular dietary changes in this study didn’t help MS; however, the diet variation did. Periodic three days mimicking fasting. In and out of ketosis actually made a difference. Just dietary changes didn’t. Anyways, we look at ancient cultures. We get evidence. We look at studies like this. We’re gaining evidence, and I’m gathering more and more.

Full circle, who’s right, the vegan, maybe; the Paleo, guy, maybe? The point is I believe that it’s this switch forcing our diets. It’s really helping our microbiome. It’s adapting from a hormonal perspective. It forces cellular health and cellular healing. There you go. We have a growing group of doctors doing this diet variation, utilizing this in strategies weekly, monthly, and we’re seeing the results. The science, yeah, it works.

Meredith:
Yes, -inaudible-. I love the idea of -inaudible- —feedback?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You’re breaking up a little bit.

Meredith:
Okay. Better now. I’m wondering too. I love the idea of diet variation, but I think there’s quite a few people with food intolerances, digestive issues. Maybe they love the idea of eating a lot of different foods, but simply can’t digest many foods. I know you’ve spoken of past clients, Dr. Pompa. When they came to you, they could only eat four or five foods. How does diet variation work with that when you literally can’t digest or can’t tolerate many foods at all?

Dr. Pompa:
Again, diet variation, also aka feast-famine cycle, so how we got a lot of those people eating more foods is fasting, periodic block fast, whether it’s once a month you do a four-day fast, even then partial fast on the back end every other month. Even intermittent fasting daily, which we’re talking about here, is a variation. I think it really leads to part of the solution for that as well, of course, removing toxins at the cellular level. Again, this is a three-legged stool. We’re talking a multi-therapeutic approach, but I think these variations play a role actually as part of the solution. Let’s work with the foods that we know that we are okay with. My wife’s calling me during a Cell TV? Is she crazy?

Meredith:
Merily.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m doing Cell TV on diet variation. I’ll call you back, all right, anyways. What? What? Anyways, I better turn off my ringer. If I know my wife, she’ll just keep calling. She’ll be like, “What do you mean? What did you say?”

Meredith:
-inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think that we can work then with the few foods that they’re okay with and still do diet variation from even a feast-famine cycle point of view.

Meredith:
Which is a modified approach, yeah. You don’t think there are any foods that we should always keep in our diet. For example, there are some foods that they say. We should always have bone broth every day or fermented foods every day. You think we should vary every single thing, or are there things that we can keep fairly consistent?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think there’s a problem with keeping certain foods always in your diet, right? I think more of the focus should be on these major nutrient caloric contents, the feast-famine cycles. I think that certain food— increasing the certain amount of foods, the amount of fats, the amount of proteins, the amount of carbohydrates, I think that matters more. At least from a clinical perspective, I can speak to that, right? Meaning that we know that far more carbohydrates versus far more fat or not. I think that matters more.

Now, if you watch the interview that we do with Jack Kruse, okay, he talked about seasonal eating, right? You’re getting more sun versus less sun, and foods can adapt to that. I don’t know clinically how much of that applies. I believe there’s truth to it. I believe there’s truth to it. I’m not the first one to talk about seasonal eating, by the way, right? A lot of people talk about eating foods that are in season, and there’s nothing new here as far as that perspective goes. I think there’s truth to it. Clinically, how much just eating different foods seasonally, I don’t know. I know that the macronutrient adjustments matters a lot, especially when we’re trying to fix a cell.

Meredith:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It does just from the adaptation perspective, and it all boils down to that is promoting cellular adaptation through good cellular stress.

Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Look, I’ll keep it really simple, right? We can think about this many ways. From a scientific perspective, very simple, bad cells don’t adapt, right? You heard our interview with Thomas Seyfried who does diet variation for cancer. He’s moving people in and out of fasting. He calls it Press Pulse. This variation, there’s magic here. I’m telling you, from a clinical perspective, we’re seeing this, so bad cells don’t adapt.

The guy who won the Nobel Prize last year, 2016, he won it for his work on something called autophagy or autophage, which simply means that your body gets rid of bad cells. When we’re forcing the body to make these changes, bad mitochondria that produce energy, bad cells don’t adapt. Eventually, you do it enough. All of a sudden, the bad cells are not adapting. Your good cells are and becoming stronger. That’s why Tom Seyfried is noticing this with cancer. We’re creating bad cells that die, simple as that. Autophagy, the guy who won the Nobel Prize showed in fasting states why autophagy is one of the big reasons we thrive in health and healing during fasting.

Bad cells don’t adapt, so is it true with many things, just switching our diet, ketosis, non-ketosis? Yes. Yes, we’re seeing this. The magic is in forcing adaptation. Weightlifters, exercise people, listen. You guys get it, right? If you do the same exercise day in, day out, what happens? You don’t make gains anymore.

What if you change the exercise you’re doing? You’re forcing adaptation. All of a sudden, now you’re sore again, and now your body adapts and becomes stronger. Every time weightlifters go in the gym, they like to switch what they do. Switch what they do, purposely changing the—that’s exercise variation. We’re doing the same thing with the diet that the bodybuilders knew for years.

You know what else we got from the bodybuilders? They knew about diet variation too. You know why? They would do carb days after they were in these major—they were getting lean. Then they would throw carb days in right before competition, and they would get extremely lean and vascular. After a carb day, day two, even the next day, I am visibly leaner. My body went in and started firing up the fat burning mechanism, and I immediately got leaner. The bodybuilders, they did that biohack for years. All we’re doing is taking this adaptation and doing it to fix cells.

Meredith:
Yeah. I know. I was feeling that too. I love practicing diet variation as well. I think I had been a little bit too low-carb for a while, so I really enjoyed a feast day this past Sunday. Often times for people, they like to just book it on a weekend where you know you can really enjoy those feasting foods, and you do feel better the next day. I did. I just felt better. My energy was better. Sometimes when you just do low-carb, you’re doing the same things for too long, your body—there’s homeostasis. It just gets a little too consistent, so you have to mix it up.

I’m wondering. I’m thinking too for people to maybe know as far as which kind of style and timing and variation works best. Do you think it would be prudent to suggest testing blood sugar and ketones as far as to track patterns, and see what might work best for you with fasting and feasting days? Do you think that’s even necessary as the results -inaudible-?

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t know if it’s necessary for the average person, right? Someone who’s sick and they start intermittent fasting, we like to look at morning glucose and ketones, and then right before their first meal. We want to see glucose dropping and ketones rising. It’s an indication that they’re responding. If glucose is rising after 18 hours of fasting, you’re in gluconeogenesis. That’s an indicator that you need to shorten your fast until you get a little bit more efficient, and that’s a strategy that we use and teach.

I think that, no matter what, everyone can benefit from this in some way and for the reasons that we’re saying. I don’t want to overcomplicate it for people that you have to test to do it. I think that, if you’re challenged, it can help determine your fast. Even like I said, I guess to some point, Joe realized his glucose levels were rising, and yet, he did what I was doing. I kept cutting my carbs, right? Why isn’t my glucose going down? We see this opposite thing occurring.

Understanding that insulin’s main function really is to shut off the liver’s production of glucose, if insulin goes lower and lower, you’re not able to do that, and then gluconeogenesis happens just from the production of glucose in the liver. Diabetics, I hope you heard that. I hope you heard that. Balancing these, throwing these feast days at it is a way to really offset the gluconeogenesis of the liver, or your body taking it’s muscle and breaking it down into sugar, which, again, that’s happening to people all the time as well. We take the muscle and break it down to sugar. That’s called gluconeogenesis, so again, throwing in feast days like this break that cycle. Then looking at your glucose could tell you. If your glucose is rising in a fasting state, change something, so there’s a good indicator.

Meredith:
Change something. I love that. For all of you who are watching who have maybe been following this strict, rigid diet, even it’s a great diet, even if it’s the Cellular Healing Diet or a ketogenic diet, vegan, Paleo, fill in the blank and if you’re following this diet, not getting results, diet variation is an incredible solution. It’s ancestral. There’s historical evidence as well as cutting-edge new science that is validating this strategy. Dr. Pompa, I think it’s brilliant, and it’s made a change in so many people’s lives. Thank you for bringing this information and explaining it in a formula and in a way that we can get it, and we can understand it, and apply it to our lives to increase our health.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Maybe we’ll attach this episode to the video that I did in Wyoming. I did a great video. Listen, I have to tell the story because I didn’t get to tell it in the video, right? My son and I were there. I had been doing days of research on the American Indians because they have a lot of great history there. Anyway, I said, okay, today we’re going out. We’re going to try and find the buffalo herd. I heard they’re coming out of the Great Plains up in Yellowstone. They were coming down to where we could actually access them, and so we did.

He thought I was nuts. He thought there’s no way we’re going to find these buffalo. We’re driving, driving, and he’s probably frustrated with me at this point. All of a sudden, I see ahead what—he was saying, “I think that’s just a bush.” I’m like, “I think it’s a buffalo.” We drove up. One turned into many. We literally ran into the buffalo herd, hundreds. There was thousands probably behind them, and there they were, right off the road.

I literally jumped out of the car. He held the camera on me, and you see the buffalo herd behind me. I started talking about the history of the American Indians. Buffalo is a huge thing, right? I went through a lot of this diet variation stuff, some of the things I shared with you, in that video. You have to watch the video. The wind’s blowing. The buffalo are behind me. Daniel was like the back door is open because if they charge you—people die from buffalo all the time. They’re mean.

He said, “If they charge, run and jump in the back door.” I’m doing this video not knowing if they could be coming or not. I’m telling you. I was ten feet from these big huge buffalo that literally could’ve charged me at any moment, so you got to see the video. It was great.

Meredith:
Awesome. I can’t wait to watch it. We’ll definitely connect it to this episode. Thanks for risking your life to bring us that information, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
I even went and—part of that video, I had my son splice it on. I even went up—because I read about the Sheep Eaters of Wyoming of the high mountains, and this is what they survived on, these sheep. They call them sheep, but they’re the bighorn sheep, like the rams. We call them the rams. Someone told me where these things are, and I went up looking for them. I found them. In the video, you see these little specs moving around. That’s the sheep. That’s the bighorn sheep, right?

I did a piece of the video of how this was the mainstay of their diet, and they survived on these things in the winter so, anyways, cool stuff. We can learn from ancient cultures diet variation, feast-famine cycles. No doubt a part of what we need as humans today. I believe that wholeheartedly.

Meredith:
Yeah. It’s so true. With our ancestors, with their diet variation, they were still always varying between whole real foods. Whether it was buffalo, and sheep, and berries, and twigs, they were still eating real food. Don’t think that diet variation can be eating -inaudible- to then eating—varying it up with some French fries. You definitely want diet variation to still include whole real foods. Bottom line, you do need to include those foods because that’s what heals your cells to decrease inflammation and ultimately help you increase your health.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. No doubt about it. Here I am in ketosis with all that amazing snow out there. Can you see that? No. I guess not.

Meredith:
No. It’s just all white out the window. We believe you.

Dr. Pompa:
Four feet of snow in the last few days.

Meredith:
You can get out there on the ski slopes. You go out and have some fun. Thanks for breaking down diet variation. We hope that you listeners and viewers out there have a better understanding of what diet variation is, why it’s so important, and some take-home strategies for how to start implementing it in your life to increase your health. Thanks as always, Dr. Pompa. You’re a wealth of information and these strategies that you found to bring us to help us live healthier lives, so thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Meredith:
Okay. Have a great weekend, and we’ll catch you next week. Bye-bye.