Hey, guys, welcome to today's episode, and I'm so, so excited to introduce you to Thomas Delauer, and he is a transformational expert. He's a husband. He's a dad, and I'm a huge fan of yours. I think your work is so amazing and so welcome to the show today.

Thank you so much. I'm stoked to be here today.

So if people have been hiding under a rock and they haven't yet heard from you, tell us tell them a little bit about you to introduce you to where people might recognize you.

Even if they maybe don't know my name.
Maybe they've seen my face. It's mainly on YouTube. So I have a two and a half million subscriber YouTube channel, predominantly in the world of intermittent fasting, metabolic health. Kiyo, all things longevity related, really. I had my own personal transformation from a three hundred pound corporate executive in the health care world to what I do now, which is pretty health, and explain how you can get the best possible outcome from what you put in your body. And so I spend my days doing that. I have a wonderful wife and two amazing kids. And, you know, now as my life has evolved, I spend a lot more time educating people on how to be healthy, how to implement intermittent fasting when they're busy with families, when life is actually coming at them at warp speed. So I pride myself on being able to articulate fairly complex subject matter and biochemistry in a way that gets people excited and passionate about changing their health. So I'm excited to dove into more of that today.
All right, well, let's jump into a few questions and then I've got some questions for you. First one is from Willie in Virginia Beach. He says, How do you get as lean as you are, which is probably about sub 10 percent body fat while still maintaining so much muscle mass and not getting too skinny?
Yeah, very, very good question. It's first important to note that I was very, very heavy before, so I had a good amount of muscle just from carrying around my weights and that sort of thing. So it's a lot easier for me to hold onto it because my body is relatively accustomed to it. Now, that's not to say that it can't be done because I've seen it done all the time. For me, it's always a matter of fluctuating the timing in which I do my fast's so that I'm never timing and consistently I'm not doing the same time periods over and over.
And what I mean by that is you have to keep your body guessing. And I don't like to ever say that specifically because you want to trick your body. That's not what we're really after. But by constantly changing the time in which you eat, the time in which you fast, you're allowing your body to kind of get into a little bit of a shock state where your results are going to be more powerful from what you're doing. And what I mean by that is if you do the same thing over and over and over again, your body's going to adapt to that. It's going to adjust to that. So if you're constantly tweaking and constantly refining, you do allow yourself to get a continuing result.
For me, that continued result is maintaining muscle and staying lean. So I'll go through periods of time where I'm going to caloric surplus or I'll go through periods of time when I'm in a deficit. But they're never extended periods. For example, I try to look at things on a different scale, whereas a lot of people will look at traditional three months of bulking and then three months of cutting and they kind of go through these back and forth where they gain a bunch of weight and then they turn it down and they don't realize that, hey, I can stay lean year round if I do that same thing, but I do it at a smaller scale. And what I mean by that is things like fasting. When I'm fasting, I'm in a deficit. When I'm eating, I'm in a surplus. But it's just compressed. So it's like in essence, I'm doing my bulking and cutting phases in one or two days rather than over six months.
Yeah, love it, that's so good, the next couple of questions I have, and it kind of goes back to what you just said, but it's constant. I will tell you, this is like one of the top questions we get and I'll sum it up for you. Basically, they're saying, you know, I'm doing intermittent fasting, I'm doing keto. I've lost 20 pounds, 30 pounds, 50 pounds, but I still have 20 or 30 more to lose. And they can't seem to get that last 20 or that last 30. And so they saw these drastic results and now they're at a standstill and they're like, I am stuck here. I've still got 20. I've still got 30 more pounds to go. I can't get them off. What would your suggestion be for those people?
Yeah, that is such a frustrating thing. And the last was like the last 15, 20 pounds for me. It was just just terrible, so difficult. And it took me so much different trial and error until I finally realized that what was happening was I was just like everybody talks about I was getting to this point where my metabolic rate had just adjusted to what I was eating. And it happens with fasting, too, is OK, maybe we're doing intermittent fasting, but in our eating window, perhaps we're only eating fifteen hundred calories. Well, thermodynamics would tell us that we have to continually decrease our calories if we want to end up losing weight. And once our body adjust to that, well, your body's just adjusted to intermittent fasting and that's just your lifestyle. But maybe it's not going to change your body composition anymore, which can be so frustrating because we're like, well, what else can I do? I've already eliminated breakfast and lunch. Now I'm just eating dinner. You know, the logical thing for people to do is just eliminate another meal and start fasting longer. But that's not necessarily the route you want to go. Just like anything. We require diet breaks. Now, when I say diet break, I don't mean that you come off of everything entirely. What I had to do was I had to periodically elevate my calories to maintenance level, just the maintenance level. And these are clean calories and I would still do it with intermittent fasting. So yeah, I might bump up my calories 10, 15, 20 percent for one to two weeks. Still fasting, but just increase my calories a little bit. And then by the time I come off of that, my body usually makes a change because it usually takes one to two weeks for your metabolism to sort of adjust again with any kind of diet break. The other piece that I really talk about a lot on my Chantel is it's very, very common for people that are doing fasting to also be doing chemo. And within the kiddo realm, it's so easy to want to just eat more fats when in reality fats are providing us with the energy source. We want our body to be able to pull the energy source from our adipose tissue, from our fat tissue. So what I typically recommend is periodically dropping the fat intake very low for one or two days. And then you're so you're really just having protein on your your days, which seems very aggressive. And it kind of is. But you're not having to do it frequently. You see, there's a lot of diets out there, like the protein Spearin modified fast, which actually ironically put a video out today on which is a medical weight loss method where you go very low calorie, very high protein, very low fat in a medical scenario. They're doing this over the long term. I'm recommending going low fat, high protein for like one or two days per week so that your body finally has an opportunity to start pulling from your stored body fat. And it doesn't get sort of adjusted or spoiled all the fat that you're giving it all the time. You need to let it actually pull from your stored tissue.
Now, then I agree with that so much for me personally. You know, I the way that for me, if I need to lose some weight, like I gained probably about seven pounds during covid and I was like, OK, I need to really take this off. But for me, I had to add in some longer, fast, and then I had to also I had to just constantly keep changing it up. I had to do like a forty eight hour fast thrown in there. Then I had to make it wear one of my days. I was doing it because I normally eat in a four to six hour window. I have to make it an eight hour window, eating more carbs, just constantly changing it up because it's just like the gym. If you're doing the same thing all the time, your body is going to adjust and just get used to it and you're not going to see the results that you want.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And along with that, changing the timing in which you fast, just like I mentioned earlier, could mean maybe you're used to doing an eating window from two p.m. to 6:00 PM or from 4:00 pm to 8pm. What's stopping you from flipping that on its head and having your eating window in the morning and fasting in the afternoon and skipping dinner? Some of the biggest results that I've had in the shortest amount of time have been when I decide to still do a 20 hour fast, except I'm fasting through dinner and overnight and then breaking my fast the next morning, you just kind of flip it on its head. But we don't typically think of that as the typical fasting because most of what's out there and most of what works and what. Convenient is just skipping breakfast, skipping lunch and then kind of getting into dinner, so I encourage people try switching it up. Try having a different fast during a different period of your diurnal rhythm. And during a different you have a different microbiome in the afternoon and you have different gene expression. You have all kinds of different things that are happening in the afternoon evening. So why not expose yourself to fasting during this different state of being? And you might be surprised at how it just all of a sudden things start to click.
Yeah, and like you said about the fat for me, I think especially for women and I've seen this for women more, is that for me, if I start doing too much fat, I will really start gaining weight. There's a happy medium. I think people just get completely out of control with the amount of fat that they're eating and then they're going, well, why am I not losing weight? Because your body's using that fat. It's not using the fat from your thighs.
The. Exactly. And it's it's a convenience thing, too. It's a heck of a lot easier to grab a fat bomb or some of these delicious keto treats that are out there than it is to cook up a little bit of meat or cook some eggs. I mean, whatever whatever your protein source is going to be, it's just it's typically more difficult to have protein in a convenient way than it is to have all these convenience foods that are out there. And we also run into the hyper palatability now. I mean, food marketing has figured out that lots of people like you. So guess what? They've figured out how to make Keto Foods taste delicious. And that just puts us right back to square one with consuming too many calories, which can definitely be a problem.
Yeah. So that brings us to this question. This is from Jacqueline in Washington, D.C. She obviously is an avid listener of yours. She says Thomas's podcasts have suggested that in order to build muscle, I should I should breakfast. And I think I should skip or I should breakfast in the morning and consider skipping dinners. Please advise on best morning meals.
Most suggested are dinner type meals. Do egg whites count as a lean protein? Jacqueline from Washington, D.C..
Jacqueline, super good question. And it does, I feel like for building muscle and for staying lean in the process. Training in the morning and then breaking your fast after your workout in the morning is just phenomenal. Couple of days a week, you don't even have to do it all the time, not not every single day. The caveat to that is if you don't train in the morning, you may want to you want to adjust to be breaking your fast whenever your workout is over. So I said that in that video because I work out in the morning and I know most of the people that listen to me or watch me probably do as well because I preach it so much. But if you work out in the afternoon, you work on the evening, you should schedule your fast as such so that you break your fast at the end of your workout. So now that I've got that out of the way, egg whites absolutely can be a lean protein. I usually scare people away from breaking their fast with egg whites because it's the Alman the egg white. If you look at a lot of Allcott scores and a lot of food sensitivities testing, you generally find that people will have a stronger immune reaction or an allergy or histamine response to egg whites than they do to your. Now, if you look at like i.p autoimmune paleo, like some of these protocols, they usually have people introduce egg yolks before they ever do introduce egg whites because they're for lack of a better term, less inflammatory. I don't I use that a little bit loosely. But that being said, of course, if you feel good eating them and they don't cause you an issue, then there's nothing wrong with it. Personally, if I break up with egg whites, I gain like three pounds in water weight over like the next like six hours. It's really, really, really wild just because I have a weird response that a lot of other people do to my wife included. So again, yes, a great lean protein if you can react OK with it. Otherwise, I would suggest going with a poultry simply because when you break a fast with poultry, you get a good amount of thymine. So you actually get the proper utilization of proper glucose utilization in the body too. And then you want to wait about 30 minutes after your workout. So when you eat that meal, just because you are going to get a little bit more fat burning that occurs just because of the post exercise, oxygen consumption after a workout. So, yeah, first thing in the morning you can have your coffee before you work out. That way, you're going to mobilize a little bit more of the fat. Finish your workout 30 minutes later. Lean protein. If you are doing carbohydrates, it wouldn't be a bad time to have carbohydrates, too. And I say that because some people do fasting with kids, some people don't. So you'd want to have very, very lean carbohydrates, something like red potato or just a microwave oven baked as a regular russet potato, super lean. Just get the starch in.
That's funny that you said that. I just took a few tenths sensitivity test and I've taken about four of them and every time something different comes up on it. But I like to take it just for fun and stuff like that. So but egg whites, every time I take a food sensitivity test for me personally, egg whites shows on it. And I've seen different peoples and it seems like that is a huge trigger. So when you're making your eggs, do you will you do like an egg? You'll just do like an egg over easy and then just take the egg whites off and just eat the center.
So sort of I feel the egg white is such a tremendous source of protein, I usually feel it's got to be dose dependent. So what I'll do is I'll usually have one or two whole eggs and then I'll add two or three additional yolks and just give the dogs the egg whites because it's good for them. Still, there's no biotin in it for the dogs. It's still a good source of protein. I don't want to waste it. So sometimes I'll cook it up separately, give it to them, otherwise I'll eat raw. So usually I'm adding extra yolk so that I'm getting a higher ratio of that and just not having as much of the inflammatory white.
Again, I'm having to speculate a little bit. There's not a lot of evidence out there. But when you look at what the egg white is, I mean, the egg white is passing antibodies and the immunity over to the chicken, which is the yolk. So, of course, it's going to be immunologically active, like it's going to be it's going to have antibodies and things like that in it because it's getting past to the chicken. So it's no surprise that we have an immune response to it because our body is probably like, what the heck's going on with this? So I again, think that dose dependent, I think if you're someone that's cooking up five or six egg whites as your meal, that's when you run into an issue. But if you're having a whole egg and you that's not the end of the world.
Hmm.
All right. This next question is from Lindsay in Baltimore, Maryland. I'm getting frustrated because I feel like I hear different people talking about different opinions of what to drink when fasting. One guy says, I have a splash of lemon in your water. It's no big deal. They say another person says Diet Coke is fine. There's no calories. Another one says it is a big deal. Some people say fifty calories of heavy cream isn't a big deal. Butter isn't a big deal and everyone seems to have conflicting ideas.
What are your thoughts? Lindsay in Baltimore, Maryland.
I don't want to add more confusion to everything. Again, the best approach is the one that works for you always. I will go on the record and say that heavy cream, butter oil. Absolutely. One hundred percent break a fast. There's different kinds of fasting that utilize them. But that is not you. I mean, that is far too many calories. If you have a tablespoon of oil or one hundred calories or you're going to definitely be breaking a fast. What you have to look at is the bigger piece of the equation. What is the actual effect of the food you're consuming or beverage that you're consuming on the body? For example, green tea, green tea is going to activate the Olympic pathway. It's going to activate like a lot of phosphate. So it's going to put you into a deeper fasted state despite having five calories or three calories, coffee, the polyphenols in coffee have been demonstrated to the trigger. More autophagy. So put you into a deeper fasted state. Caffeine in general is going to mobilize lipids. It's also going to stop the breakdown of Sickler. I don't see Monáe phosphate. And what all that gobbledygook means is that they're essentially putting you into a deeper fasted state and giving you more of the desired outcome. Let's not forget that no matter what, no matter what, if you want to be doing the purest, most absolute clean, fast possible, it's just water. Everything else is getting granular with different approaches. So if you ever just want to know what is the baseline, cleanest way to fast, it's just with water. It don't even add salt. OK, but if you want to start playing around and seeing what gets you the best outcome and makes you feel the best, it gets you the best body composition result. Play around with what works for you. But having the dairy, having that stuff during a fast, that's just. No, that's just a lot of calories. That's just going to be basically doing. Kiddo, you're kicking yourself out of a fasted state. I would say the top line amount of calories you should consume during a fast is going to be ten. Ten calories is a good number that I stick to.
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Awesome. Love it. OK, this is from Oksana. Is there any better way to drink a CV? I can't stand it even when you add lemon juice and et cetera. Can ACB mess up your thyroid functions over a long period of time?
I don't think that is going to suffer thyroid functions because the main benefit from AKB is just the acetic acid, which is just the vinegar. And just a lot of people that watch me would probably hate me for saying this, but acetic acid you're going to get from any vinegar, really. Apple cider vinegar has a few more polyphenols in it just because of the nature of how it's fermented. So by far, it's the best vinegar that's out there. But you can get a lot of the same metabolic effects by, quite frankly, having a white vinegar, which doesn't sound that exciting. But if it's a little bit easier for you to get down and have a little bit of white vinegar with some water and a little bit squirt a lemon, you're still going to get a lot of the acetic acid benefit. You see, the acetic acid is going to get converted into it, goes to a Process Mortgage, convert it into a SEATO acetate. And when that process happens at the cellular level, it again is putting you into a deeper, faster state. I did a specific video on this. So it's not going to affect your thyroid because it's not really doing much there at all. But it helps activate the pathways that get you deeper into a fasted state. You could take apple cider vinegar capsules if you got pure ones. The hard part, there's a lot of times they're also mixed with maltodextrin or been mixed with another filler to fill up a capsule. But you're getting the acetic acid in that effect. Remember, you can diluted as much as you want to. You don't have to take a potent shot of it if you want to mix it with 12 ounces of water, a little splash of lemon and a little bit of stevia, you're just as good as if you were to take a straight shot of it. The only benefit that comes from having a straight shot of it is sort of the gustatory response that comes from having some pungent and powerful tasting like that, which has a neurological effect sort of waking you up. It's a lot of people that are looking to get off of coffee will have a shot of HCV because it'll wake you up. There's no way around it.
Awesome. All right. This is from Zaara in Fairfax. What are the biggest fasting and Kito tips that you've learned now versus from before? I don't know when that means that you can stay as chiseled as you are. Like, if you had to give your top five tips for today, what would they be?
And they're going to you all are going to read me for this because it changes so much.
Because it's like I have so many things that, yeah, it's new things.
Yes, I know. It's so easy. You totally get it Chantel because it's like you're you know, you're public facing. And if you evolve and you learn, sometimes people get upset with you for it because it doesn't mean I'm changing the direction. It just means I'm learning new things. So as of right now, what I've learned is sort of what I mentioned earlier, not being stuck in your ways, shifting, shifting when you can fast when you fast break yourself out of that rut. So that's tip number one, shift the time periods in which you fast. Tip number two is shift the time period in which you work out during your fast sometimes work out at the beginning, sometimes work out at the end. I'm all about variety and keeping it as fresh as I can there and having different effects.
The third tip is one that I've learned relatively I don't know, in the last year or so, I used to be all about just breaking your fast with any kind of protein. Just break fast protein. Now I've learned more about not breaking the fast with red meat, breaking the fast with more of a white meat or more of like a protein or a way protein that's going to have thiamin in it simply because it's going to, again, help that glucose uptake a little bit more. Another thing that I've learned that is a very, very big tip. Well, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too much. As I know we're talking about body composition, but having a little bit of salt before breaking your fast simply because it's going to help stabilize the blood serum levels of sodium. So you don't feel kind of lethargic and weak afterwards, because sometimes it's what happens during a fast is your blood levels of electrolytes stay fairly regular, your serum levels, because what happens is the body recognizes that you're not eating. So it'll pull electrolytes out of the tissues and put it into the blood level blood to keep it stable. That's the job. The body's job is to keep that level stable. So then what ends up happening is you break your fast and all of a sudden all the sodium that's necessary level is going to flood into the tissue because insulin is going to spike. So that means all of a sudden you get this big drop in electrolytes that occurs right after you break it fast.
But if you have some sodium right before you break your fast, then you have ingested sodium. That's going to help offset that. So I was finding that I was fasting a lot and I was getting really lethargic like 30 minutes after I broke my fast eating with something light. And like this is getting kind of weird what's going on and realize that that was what was happening. So that's an important one. And that's been one more. That's body composition related. And I always have like new and new and interesting ones.
I would say so. So if you look on here, this is my blood glucose monitor. So I don't have diabetes, but I had bought myself a DexCom monitor and so I know my blood sugar. So I just finished eating about an hour ago and so but it's my blood sugars at ninety one. Said to me, that's a win, you know, so my blood sugar stays at a ninety one. After I finish eating I'm happy and I will tell you this thing has been the most powerful thing that I've ever done personally, because at any one given time I see how I personally react to fruit and this and that. So if I have, if I decide to have half a cup of blueberries, what's it going to do to me? And really looking at my sugar levels has been one of the most powerful things, because then I can see, OK, what happens to me if I have a cup of coffee and I put my oil in it? What is my blood sugar now? It's really powerful.
Yeah, it tells you a lot. That would be a very, very big tip as well, if you can. I've worn GMES off and on and I'm about to start wearing another one next week to try out a different model just to see. But the point is, is you learn something new about yourself and there are some really interesting studies coming out with what they're calling blood algorithms. And like people, different people flat out respond to different foods. And this is going to get reamed for saying this.
But there's literally people like massive forty six thousand cohort studies that can eat cookies and cake and not have the same glycemic response and not have the same negative effect as it has on other people. Why we don't really know is that microbiome related. The cool thing about science is we're always learning and we never know everything that's happening. It's our job to uncover it. So if you start learning what works for you and when you're getting the best outcome, then that's awesome.
And a personal question for you, because I got a bunch of bloodwork back and I always seem to find I have some reasons behind it. But I'm curious for you, when you're deep in a fasted state versus like towards the beginning of a fast state, do you find that your blood glucose gets a little bit elevated and then it comes down after you eat? Or do you find the opposite?
You know, it really depends how long I'm going for a fast. So I've done three day fast, five day fast, nine day fast.
The longest I've done with just water is nine days. But it all depends on what I ate before and how long. It's just it really is kind of all over the map on. But you know, what I love about this is when I do do a longer, fast, I can tell, you know, even when you're in a deep fasted state, what's weird is actually caffeine. Having a little bit of caffeine actually does raise my blood sugar and a little bit like it's not a lot, but I can watch on here. So if I have a caffeine and I can watch my blood sugar rise a little bit, but if I put a cup of coffee and I put my oil in it, my blood sugar will drop by 10 points like these little things like that. Like I just like I'm a little obsessed with this thing, but I just watch it like, OK, now it's at 88, you know, just looking at what it is. But it it goes back to what works for your body. And it's interesting because I have other friends that are on here and I watch them and they do it and they're like, oh, I eat this and my blood sugar didn't change at all. So that's what's so important is figuring out what does your body work. I have a guy that works with me. He is literally this big. I mean, he's just so small. He's going to be listening to this podcast. He's just very, very thin and he literally eats carbs all day long. That's all he does. He eats cookies and carbs and he tries to gain weight. And he just the more carbs he eats, he's just as skinny as skinny can be.
Yeah, that it's just it's totally it's when I'm early in a fast it's or should should say early. But if I started the fast after dinner the next morning, my blood glucose is generally pretty high like Albie's between ninety five and one hundred usually.
And that's because in a fast state you have peripheral insulin resistance and you have less glucose being utilized at the tissue level and more glucose being utilized at the brain. So as a result it's going to to the brain, but it's not going to be used by this vast array of tissue in your body. So like my levels go up, I don't start to see my blood glucose levels go down until after I eat, which tells you that, well, not diabetic, because I'm having a response to insulin as soon as I eat some food and insulin has spiked, blood sugar goes down and stabilizes and hovers around 75 to 80. But during a fast, it elevates. So it's kind of interesting because of adapting myself so much to that. My fasting glucose is high, like sometimes over one hundred, and I'm very open about that. I also is pre diabetic when I was three hundred pounds before, so I'm sure it has a degree of that too.
But I say that because we have this theory that our like our our morning fasting glucose is the only number that we should be paying attention to, the fact that is probably the number that is most likely to be impacted by external factors.
Stress in the morning, coffee in the morning, workouts in the morning. It's actually the worst time to test your glucose. The best time to be testing your glucose is just like you're talking about. It is periodically throughout the day. But you can't really do that without a glucose monitor.
Yeah, that's that's so good, because actually mine most days are at around ninety five to a hundred and every once in a while it might be at 102 when I wake up and if you look at the charts they will tell you that between one hundred and one hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty five is prediabetic and there's they call it, I don't know if you've heard this, the Don phenomenon that you know, that basically your hormone changes like your body is like giving yourself a boost in blood sugar to kind of get yourself up out of bed. And so your body makes a little bit more insulin in them to kind of get you going in the morning.
Yep, exactly. Yeah, Don. Phenomena, it's just it all has to do with I mean, it's purely circadian do like it'll it'll actually determine it. When is this person normally getting up. It's 3:00 a.m. They get up at five a.m. elevated blood glucose, a little bit elevated catecholamines like cortisol and things like that, so that when this person wakes up, their blood sugar doesn't drop too low and their blood pressure doesn't drop too low. And they can you know, if it if they have to get up and run from a tiger, they can. It's pretty wild.
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Yes. So for me, if I'm eating it all really depends on what I have eaten that day in the last couple of days. So for me, if I'm eating normal, let's say I might have a little bit of quinoa or a little bit of more carbs or a little bit of fruit the day before. My blood glucose will be anywhere between ninety five and hundred when I wake up. But if I'm like right now I'm doing a 30 day no sugar detox where I'm not having any grains, no sugar, no fruit. I mean I'm like really being very strict right now. So now when I'm waking up in the morning, my blood glucose is still like maybe around 90, 92. But again, it's still way higher. And then I wake up and I go straight to the gym and then my blood glucose immediately.
Once I start even just getting up and moving around, you'll see it go from ninety five all the way down to 80. Yeah. And then it'll just kind of stay right there at 80. So again, like you said, you have you have to watch that because looking at mine, mine might wake up at one or two. Someone would say, well you've got pre diabetes. Yeah. And my blood sugar I used to before I lost thirty five pounds. I was pre diabetic as well. And from doing fasting my I'm not I'm not pre diabetic anymore. Yeah.
It's pretty amazing how I just conditions the body to utilize the right substrates.
Well what haven't I asked you that you want listeners to know anything that you would say. You know, I think now I've kind of really gotten a little bit better handle on this or as I've been going through it, I've learned this. Any other tips that you can give listeners?
You know, one thing I've really learned that it's become very important to me is that and I think this is going to speak to a lot of people, I I have a very addictive personality. It's how I've always been, why I got addicted to food before. It's what it's why I don't drink. It's why it's very easy to get addicted to fasting. And one of the things that I've learned that's sort of come with, I guess, some degree of mastery with fasting is really being able to listen to my body when when I'm fasting too much in order to maintain the powerful effects of fasting. You know, sometimes I'll take five, six days off from fasting and then hit it a little bit more aggressively. And what I've really, really found is that slightly longer, more infrequent fasts seem to be more effective for me. And that doesn't mean that it's going to be that way forever. The body always changes, hormones change. And I encourage people to, again, to look at things with a little bit more of a a wide angle lens versus just this constant, like, macro lens. You know, if the amount of hours that you're consuming food stays the same and the amount of hours that you're not consuming food stays the same, then that's fine, just adjusted accordingly. So, you know, sometimes. So I've really been a big fan of doing what's called like monk fasting during a thirty six hour fast, even one day a week, just to twist things up.
So that will go something like not eating dinner for two days in a row. Right. So I, I sometimes we eat dinner in the evening or the next day, so maybe I'll have dinner at five or six p.m. and then I won't eat again until not the next morning but the morning after. And something really cool happens, not only physically but mentally with that, because being able to like skipping dinner and just going a whole day without eating regularly is really powerful for the mind. It just does something where I feel like I really accomplished something and I feel like there's this element of restraint that I have to really kick in. And it's when you guys all know it's difficult to not eat dinner with the family, it's difficult to not eat before bed. We just want to have something. And going to bed hungry is kind of tough, but there's also something kind of nice that comes with it. So that's been something that's really just been a really aha moment for me lately, is that if I just do somewhat longer but more infrequently, the desired outcome ends up being pretty interesting. I mean, I wouldn't say it's the only way to go, but it's something to mess around with.
I love that. And it's so funny that I actually have made a commitment to do every single week a one either thirty six or forty eight hour fast. And the reason why I've done that is because I listen to my body. And so once a week that's it. Chantel is doing a either thirty six or forty eight hour and it depends on the time of the month that for my period. And the reason is, is because even if the week before my period, you know, everyone's like we eat more because we're just the hormones are there and we want we're hungrier. So but even then I'm still going to try to do a thirty six now for me, day fifteen through day twenty one on my period. It's much easier for me to be fast so when depending on when my cycle is during that. I might do a 48 hour fast, but I think that's so cool because that's one of the things I've committed to doing just once a week, a 36 hour or forty eight hour, all depending on kind of where I am in my cycle and not only where I am in my cycle, but what is my body telling me. Like for me after thirty six hours I can tell, ok, that's it. I'm done like I need it. Or you know what, I'm going to push myself a little bit more this week.
Totally. And it's interesting because I've done a lot of research into that world. I don't I obviously I'm a guy so I can only speak to it from the research side. But your your estrogen phases, like during the first two weeks after your period, those are the perfect time to be. That's the perfect time to be able to do more like strength training and more resistance training, because you have estrogen acts as a nice buffer and actually is very good for recovery. So, yeah, exactly that. So it's like you can get more out of like training and potentially doing shorter fasts with that first two week period and do a little bit more longer, fast kind of beat back half. So it's interesting that you kind of found that naturally because that's where the research really points with, you know, trying to optimize, you know, women have this additional layer of complexity that men don't have to deal with where it's layer of complexity, but it also gives you different advantages. You've got some other advantages that you can count on during a certain time of the month versus others. And if you understand those and learn those, you can capitalize on them. So it's pretty cool.
Yeah, because I had how I figured it out is because I just started looking at because one time I did a seven day fast from day fifteen, it was like day fifteen through, you know, whenever. And then I was like, this is pretty easy, not easy. I mean a seven day fast is hard no matter what. But considering right. I was like that was actually not as bad as I thought. Then I tried to do just like a three day fast and. Right. You know, it was like right before my period and I was like, this is a nightmare. I can't do this. So it really your hormones play such a huge part in it. They totally do. Yeah, well, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. Tell listeners where they can find you and where they can follow you and see how you usually say it's more.
So where can you hide from me? Because I know YouTube is the main jam. I definitely I highly recommend you check out my and subscribe and make sure you subscribe and turn on those notifications, because as we all know, YouTube is making it a lot more difficult for videos to get out there. So it's it's got to turn on those notifications. But also, Tom, still our dotcom, which really doesn't have a whole lot on there. But if you need to get in touch with me or interested in anything or have questions, Thomastown, our dot com can hit the contact form and, you know, reach out to me that way or subscribe to my email newsletter that way.
Awesome. And if you have a question, get your questions at Chantel Ray dot com. We'll see you next time.