Fasting

An organic plant-based whole-food diet should be the first step to detox your body.

Detox method number two is fasting.
There are different types of fasting.

One is the water fast.

Water fasting is an incredible therapy. Fasting supercharges your immune system.
There’s a fascinating study that came out a couple of years ago (2016) where they found that during a three-day water fast old and damaged immune cells die off, stem cells awaken from their normal dormant state and start regenerating. Then when you start eating again your body ramps up production of new immune cells.

The 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Japan’s Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of the underlying mechanisms of a physiological process called autophagy. Autophagy is a natural process by which the body degrades and recycles damaged cells, proteins and toxins. Autophagy comes from two Greek words, auto meaning “self” and phagy meaning “to eat.”

This is the body’s way of cleaning house. It happens during starvation, calorie restriction, and fasting. If the body fails to engage in autophagy, damaged cells and structures can accumulate dangerously. Autophagy is one method that the body uses to naturally neutralize cancer cells and degrade cells infected by harmful bacteria and viruses.

So fasting basically reboots and recharges your immune system. They found that when cancer patients water fasted 24hours before chemotherapy treatment, the treatment worked better, because water fasting weakened the cancer cells.

Reset your immune system by fasting

Water fasting can be very beneficial and I want to encourage you to do it. Most people can handle a three day water fast without any problems.
If you have a serious health condition, you should check with your doctor before attempting a fast.
Your doctor may not know anything about fasting. He may say you can’t do it or you shouldn’t do it. If that’s the case then you fast at your own risk.
For most people fasting is perfectly safe. I’ve done it many times and never had a problem.
Fasting gives your body a break from digestion and when you fast your body switches from normal daily operations to repair and regeneration mode.

Your body is constantly processing the foods that you’re bringing in and using them to create energy and maintain homeostasis to keep you alive. But when you fast you stop the conveyor belt, so food stops coming in. Now you’ve got all these workers that don’t have anything to do, because there’s nothing on the conveyor belt. There’s no food to process, so they’re like: “What do we do now? Well, let’s look around and see what needs repair!”

When you fast, your body switches gears into internal housecleaning mode. You’re giving it a break, which allows it to pay attention to things that have been overlooked. It will break down and recycle the useful parts from old and damaged cells. It will caused new cells to be born, effectively renewing the immune system.

During a fast your body will also break down fat for energy.
Fat is your body’s secondary energy reserve. You have two backup energy reserves. You have glycogen, which is stored in your liver and converted to glucose if you need extra energy. Then when that glucose runs out, your body starts burning fat.

It takes about 24 hours to burn through the glucose that’s stored in your liver. Once you burnt through that, your body will start burning through body fat. If you’re active the first day of your fast, your body will burn through the glucose faster and switch to fat-burning sooner.

Fat is a place that your body stores toxins. So when you start a fast, whether it’s a water fast or juice fast, as your body starts to break down the toxic fat, you’re going to feel bad. You will have detoxification symptoms. They are called ‘Herxheimer Effect’ or the ‘Healing Crisis’. Some people experience this just from converting from the standard Western diet to a raw food diet or a plant-based diet and there’s a few reasons why: food addiction and detoxification.

  • We’re addicted to a diet that’s high in protein, fat, sugar, and salt and when you remove the animal protein and the high levels of sugar, fat, and salt from your diet, you will experience withdrawal symptoms. You will also experience withdrawal from caffeine and other food additives like Aspartame if you’ve been drinking diet sodas or chewing gum all day.

  • The other reason you feel bad when you switch to a hardcore healthy diet is detoxification. So again, when you start burning through body fat, your body starts dumping toxins into your bloodstream and they circulate around and your body has to process them in order to excrete them. During that process you’re going to feel lousy. Some typical reactions are low energy, headaches, nausea, aches and pains. You could get diarrhoea. You might throw up.
    If any of those things happen, it’s because there’s some serious detox going on in your body. Just power through it, again under medical supervision if necessary.
    If you’re taking prescription drugs this could be dangerous, so you need to make sure you’re cautious about your approach.

    You might even run a fever. Your immune system ramps up into high gear when you have a fever. A fever can wipe out a host of viruses, bacteria, and parasites in your body that you didn’t even know you had. And stuff is going to come out in a lot of different ways if you’re toxic, so this could cause, like I said, aches and pains, headaches, nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, fever, pimples, rashes, any of the above, but hopefully not all of the above. The best case scenario is, you just feel lousy, no energy, maybe a bit of a headache for a few days. The worst case could be pretty rough for a few days, but remember, if and when you start feeling bad, just remind yourself: “This is normal. I will get better.”

    When you get over that detoxification hump, usually after a few days, worst case a week, you will feel amazing.

There might be a point in your fast where you feel so good that you may think to yourself that you never need to eat again, which, of course, is not true. Eventually you will get hungry and that’s a good time to eat.
Your immune system will generate new blood cells as soon as nutrients start flowing back into the body.

Now how long should you fast is something that you should determine. If you want to just get your feet wet, you can do a one day water fast – that’s pretty easy. A three day water fast is the optimal minimal length of time. There are people that have done forty day water fasts. That’s serious. You definitely need professional supervision if you go that long. The longest I’ve personally fasted on water, is five days. I haven’t gone for a longer fast, because I have a high metabolism, I’m really thin and struggle to put on body fat.

 

The next step down from water fasting, is juice cleansing.

Some people will start with the three day water fast and then do a three, five, or a ten day juice cleanse. And then, when they come out of the fast, they’ll transition to raw food or plant-based wholefood diet. Lots of fresh fruit first and incorporate vegetables as well. There’s all kinds of information online about different fasting methods, but I’m all about simplicity. I think the optimal starting point for most people is three days on water, then using juices (mainly vegetable, not fruit juices) to transition to a plant-based diet.

Now the more body fat you have, the longer you can fast.
All body fat is really just stored energy. In case there’s a food shortage, that’s good! But if you have a lot of extra body fat, it’s a burden to your entire body. We know that obesity is the second leading cause of cancer, so you need to get rid of the excess body fat. A nice benefit of fasting is a quick loss of body fat.
If you’re not sure what you’re supposed to weigh, you can do a Google search for a BMI calculator and just type in your height and your weight and it will tell you if you’re underweight, normal, overweight, or obese. That’s the best way to find your ideal weight range.

For the best podcast on fasting, listen to the podcast below with Dr. Sunil Pai and Dr. Michael Klaper.

Dr. KlaperMichael Klaper, M.D. is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine and received postgraduate training in internal medicine, surgery, anesthesiology, and orthopedics at UBC teaching hospitals in Vancouver and obstetrics at UCSF. He has practiced acute care medicine in Hawaii, Canada, California, Florida and New Zealand.
Dr. Klaper focuses on health-promoting food and lifestyle choices to help people prevent the need for hospitalization and surgery. He has authored numerous articles on plant-based nutrition and has been featured in several films including the award winning “Diet For A New America”, “What the Health”, and “Cowspiracy.”
A long-time radio host and a pilot, Dr. Klaper has served as nutrition advisor to NASA’s programs for space colonists on the Moon and Mars.
Dr. Klaper adopted a plant-based diet in 1981 and has helped thousands of patients with diet and use of fasting. Learn more about his videos and newsletter at DoctorKlaper.com.
 

What is the best diet?

There are about 20,000 genes in the human genome. The genes are static and do not change, but they can lead to develop up to  4 million different bodies, because each gene can make over 200 different protein structures depending on its environment. The biggest environmental factor is nutrition. 

The biggest environmental factor on the human body is nutrition. 

So, don’t believe anybody, or any doctor in particular, who tries to tell you that it doesn’t matter what you eat.

This way of thinking is not only absurd, it is completely ignorant, and grossly uninformed.

Science understands that food fuels our body, giving us the ability to function appropriately. If your body were a car, you would be careful to give it the right type of fuel. 

You wouldn’t put kerosene or lighter fluid in your car, nor would you put cheap gas in a Ferrari.

But when it comes to what we eat, we do just that – choose the cheapest fuel possible. It’s easy to understand how kerosene would ruin your car, but when it comes to our bodies, we do not acknowledge the consequences of using the wrong fuel, partly because our bodies are too good. It just takes too long before bad food choices show their consequences.

What diet does fuel our bodies best?

In my eyes the best diet should be able to reverse any disease by tapping into the body’s ability to heal itself. The optimum nutrition should minimise the risk of developing diabetes, cardio vascular disease, cancer or any other disease of the western civilisation.

So, which diet do you think does just that? The standard American diet? Just joking.

Maybe the Mediterranean diet? All the studies on the Mediterranean diet have shown that, compared to the standard American diet, it is

able to reduce heart disease and related conditions by approximately 75%. That’s amazing, but what about the other 25%? Why did those people on the Mediterranean diet still get heart disease even though they were eating this incredibly healthy diet? Wasn’t there a diet that could prevent heart disease for everyone?

Yes, there is!

A plant based diet reduces heart disease and related conditions by 95 percent. It can reduce the risk of heart disease even more by increasing the intake of plant-based proteins, reducing the intake of animal-based proteins (even seafood) and eliminating the heavy use of refined oils.

The most comprehensive report on diet and cancer in history was published in 1997. This first report took over four years to complete, reviewing 4500 studies from thousands of researchers across the globe – a landmark scientific consensus document written by the top cancer researchers in the world. Download the summary of the third update of this report from 2018 here.

After all that work, what was the number one recommendation?

Choose a diet that is predominantly plant based, rich in a variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and beans with minimally processed starchy foods.

 

Chris Wark, a cancer survivor himself, promotes a whole-food plant-based diet as the centre piece for the radical lifestyle change necessary to survive a cancer diagnosis.

On his website Chris Beat Cancer you’ll find many testimonials from cancer survivors that used his programme, based on a whole food plant based diet, to recover their health.

There are no cancer survivor stories out there on the internet of people who survived cancer with a ketogenic, paleo or Atkins diet.

With every piece of food you put into your mouth you either promote disease or health.

Most people don’t understand, that what you put at the end of your fork, is more powerful than any drug you find in a pill bottle.

 

Rebounding for Longevity

The best exercise for detoxification is rebounding. That’s jumping up and down on a small one-person trampoline.

Rebounding

Rebounding & Increasing Vitamin D

Your lymphatic system and your blood get rid off the metabolic waste in your body. You have three times more lymphatic fluid than blood, but the lymphatic system doesn’t have a pump like your cardiovascular system.  It only moves when YOU move.

So when you’re sedentary it’s not moving very much, but when you’re walking, when you’re doing physical work, when you’re picking things up, when you’re putting things down, every muscle contraction in your body moves your lymphatic system, even breathing (especially deep Wim Hof breathing).

To stay healthy you need 30 to 60 minutes a day of deliberate, moderate aerobic exercise, like Rebounding.

Rebounding is easy. Anyone can do it and you can do it for a long time without getting tired, because it only requires a gentle bouncing motion where your feet don’t even leave the mat.

But what effect can an easy activity, like half an hour of rebounding, have on your body?

“Not much” is probably what you think, but a well-known 2007 study  found that breast cancer patients who walked 30 minutes a day and ate five or more servings of fruits and vegetables per day, had half the recurrence after 9 years compared to patients who didn’t exercise as much or eat as many fruits and vegetables.

That’s incredible. Anybody can do that!

2014 study of over 4,600 Swedish men with early-stage prostate cancer found that the men who walked or biked every day for 20 minutes or more, had a 30% decreased risk of dying from prostate cancer and a 30% lower risk of dying from any other cause compared to men who were less active.

The bottom line is: If you want to stay healthy, you need to create daily habits that keep you in motion. It doesn’t have to be one long block of exercise. You can break it up any way you want: 10-20 minutes Rebounding in the morning, 10-20 minutes around lunch time and another 10-20 minutes in the evening. Do it while you’re watching TV or rebound outside and fill up on Vitamin D at the same time.

Apart from activating your lymph system, the G-force resistance you experience during Rebounding strengthens your entire musculoskeletal system: your bones, muscles, connective tissue, and even organs.

Just gently bounce on the Rebounder.

Stick to a basic bounce until you get bored and then go all 80s Aerobics or Disco. Anything is allowed!

 

For further information, check out:

  • Introduction video by Chris Wark (from “Chris Beat Cancer“)
  • Al Carter is THE pioneer of rebound exercise. Enjoy his lecture/rebound session here.
    Carter is the founder of ReboundAir and the author of  “The Miracle of Rebound Exercise” (published in 1979!)

Ketosis

Ketosis is a metabolic state where the body burns fat for energy instead of sugar.

Some people try to reach ketosis by avoiding carbohydrates in their diet, but another trick is, adding butter or MCT oil or even both to your coffee. It makes your coffee bulletproof and will help your body burn more fat as an energy source.

A ketone level of 0.6 mM* indicates ketosis. Typically, circulating levels of ketones are at ~0.1 mM in the average person after an overnight fast.
Dave Asprey who is the author of the book “Bulletproof Diet”, describes that after drinking a cup of bulletproof coffee, the blood ketone level can reach 0.7mM within 30 minutes.
People on low-carb diets have to restrict their intake of carbohydrates for three days before they can reach the same level.

*mM stands for millimolar. It’s the measuring unit of concentrations expressing the number of moles of the substance (here ketones) present in a defined volume of solution: A 1 millimolar (1 mM) solution contains 1 millimole per litre (1 mmol/l).

Optimum blood ketone levels for nutritional ketosis range from 0.5 to 3.0 mM,
according to Volek and Phinney in their best-selling book “The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Living”.

Antioxidants

Antioxidants help neutralize harmful free radicals in your body by donating an electron to the free radical’s unpaired electron.

If there are no antioxidants present, free radicals take electrons from healthy cells in the body, causing oxidative stress.

The apples above demonstrate how oxidative stress breaks down your cells, causing premature aging and disease.

 

Best antioxidant rich foods
1) Goji berries 25000 ORAC* score
2) Dark chocolate 21000 ORAC score
3) Pecan nuts 17000 ORAC score
4) Wild blueberries 14000 ORAC score
5) Elderberries 14000 ORAC score
6) Artichokes 9400 ORAC score
7) Cranberries 9500 ORAC score
8) Kidney beans 8400 ORAC score
9) Blackberries 5300 ORAC score
10) Coriander 5100 ORAC score

*ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. It’s a lab test that attempts to quantify the “total antioxidant capacity” (TAC) of a food.