So, back to our guest today. He’s a life-long fitness enthusiast with an undergraduate degree in Applied Human Nutrition. After university, he joined a small nutritional supplement company, and over the course of six years, proceeded to help them grow into one of the world’s largest supplement companies as their Research & Development Manager. During that time, he traveled the world meeting everyone from researchers to ingredient manufacturers, to world-famous athletes and body builders. I’d say that that alone makes him a great candidate for the show, but hold on, because it gets better.

After six years, he jumped back into academia and did graduate-level work to figure out what exactly are the metabolic effects of short-term fasting, of all things. This groundbreaking work rendered him one of the world’s experts, and has caused him to publish books such as Eat Stop Eat and How Much Protein. Today he publishes a popular blog on these topics and much much more, offering the benefits of his combined industry insider and academic backgrounds.

You guys are going to love this episode. We get a chance to learn the ins and outs of intermittent fasting, and figure out why you should care. We talk supplements and the problems with the supplement industry. You even get some homework assignments and things to try out during this week.

One thing, guys, is that I’d like to ask you guys a favor. After you listen to this episode, send me an email or a tweet to @gosuperhuman and let me know one thing you liked or didn’t like about this episode. I have to admit, though we see the statistics and the thousands of downloads every week, it can get a bit lonely here if you guys aren’t writing in with your feedback and comments.

OK – Enough whining. Enjoy the show!

In this episode with Brad Pilon, we discuss:

• When was the last time Brad actually ate?
• Why is intermittent fasting scientifically interesting, and what health benefits does it offer?
• When we stop eating, do we burn protein and muscles, or do we burn fat?
• Besides the caloric deficit and dieting aspect, what are the other aspects that make fasting very interesting?
• Does intermittent fasting allow you to be less responsible about what foods you eat?
• Understanding ketosis, fat loss, glycolysis, respiratory quotient and “metabolic flexibility”
• What else can your body use (besides glucose) to generate energy (surprising)
• Should you exercise or train while fasting?
• What is insulin sensitivity and why should you be concerned about it?
• What are the differences between diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and insulin insensitivity?
• Is intermittent fasting for everybody?
• What is the ideal regimen and schedule for intermittent fasting?
• How difficult is fasting for people to adopt?
• Food expectation vs. actual hunger – and overcoming it
• Brad's experience in the supplement industry, and what it was like to rub elbows with elite athletes
• The major issues between research and marketing in the supplement industry
• Which supplements actually make a difference?
• What is “health attraction” and what does it mean?
• Discussions of obsession, drawing the line, and how much you should really train

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Our previous episode with Ben Greenfield
• Supplements:
  • Leucine
  • BCAA
  • NO-Xplode
  • Creatine
  • Yohimbine
  • Glucosamine
  • Huperzine-A
  • Athletic Greens
• Brad's website
• EatStopEat.com
• Brad on Twitter

Favorite Quotes from Brad Pilon:

Transcript:

Introduction: Welcome to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast. Where we interview extraordinary people to bring you the skills and strategies to overcome the impossible. And now here's your host, Jonathan Levi.

Jonathan Levi: Before we get started today, I just want to let you guys know that this episode is brought to you by Onnit. From their awesome fitness equipment to their ultra high-quality health supplements. Onnit offers an entire range of products to help you become superhuman. Check them out at jle.vi/onnit and  use the coupon code getonnit for 10% off today.

Greetings ladies and gents, and welcome to this week's show. I hope you guys are hungry for some knowledge, actually hungry is the operative word because my guest today is the expert on an interesting little habit called intermittent fasting. Now you guys might remember intermittent fasting as something that came up in our episode with Ben Greenfield. It's actually something he swears by. And so we decided to check it out today.

So back to our guest, he's a lifelong fitness enthusiast with an undergraduate degree in applied human nutrition. After university, he joined a small nutritional supplement company, and over the course of six years, he proceeded to help them grow into one of the world's largest supplement companies.

As their research and development manager. During that time, he traveled the world, meeting everyone from researchers to ingredient manufacturers. World-class athletes, bodybuilders, you name it. I'd say that alone makes him a great candidate for the show, but hold on because it actually gets better.

After six years, you jumped back into academia and he did the graduate level thing to figure out what exactly were the metabolic effects of short-term fasting of all things. This groundbreaking work rendered him. One of the world's experts and has caused him to publish books such as eat, stop, eat, and how much protein today.

He publishes a popular blog on these topics and much, much more. And he offers the benefits of his combined industry, insider and academic backgrounds. You guys are really going to love this episode. We get a chance to learn the ins and outs of intermittent fasting and figure out why the hell you should care.

We talk supplements and the problems with the supplement industry, even get some homework assignments and things to try out during the week. One thing guys that I would like to ask is a small favor. After you listened to this episode. Do me a favor and send me an email or tweet to@gosuperhuman. And let me know one thing you liked or didn't like about this episode.

I have to admit that, although we see these statistics and thousands upon thousands of you guys are downloading every week, it can get a bit lonely. If you guys aren't writing in with your feedback and comments. So please take a second to do that. All right. Enough mushy crying and whining and complaining. Let's meet Mr. Brad Pilon.

Jonathan Levi: Mr. Brad pylon is Pilon. Is it peanut 

Brad Pilon: Pilon, pylon, either one. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Pilon, Mr. Brad Pilon. Welcome to the show, my friend, how are you doing?

Brad Pilon: Good. Good. How are you?

Jonathan Levi: Fantastical, fantastical. I am very excited to get into intermittent fasting because it's something that has come up in a couple of episodes. I just talked to Ben Greenfield recently and he was talking about how he fasts every day.

So I figured, Hey, you know, let's get the expert on. Let's talk about. Really what this thing is, why it's becoming so popular. Why so many people are advocating it? I think you can answer those questions for us. 

Brad Pilon: Yeah. I know it's a topic I'd like to talk about it. 

Jonathan Levi: So that works perfectly to talk about, to blog, about, to write 

Brad Pilon: About the, write about, you know, sort of everything.

Jonathan Levi: I love it. So there's a lot I want to ask you about, I have to admit it was hard for me to pick questions that would fit into one interview. Okay. But I think I'll start by asking. When was the last time you ate? 

Brad Pilon: That is a good question and a relevant question. Breakfast today. I just finished my fast-up yesterday, so I had a little Greek yogurt this morning and espresso and then I'm good to go.

Jonathan Levi: Love it. So very-low-calorie breakfast, 

Brad Pilon: then I've never been big. I like breakfast. There have been a big breakfast person. I hold out for the odd occasional brunch. I'm a big brunch guy. If a mimosa is, are involved, I'm good. But for breakfast, I have to get it eaten and then get on. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: All right. So you're already less of a fanatical diet guy than I was expecting.

I have to admit the food would be like no alcohol, no dairy. Yeah, no, no, not happening. Never. I love it. All right. So we're going to get a good perspective here. So let me ask this, like I said, intermittent fasting is not a new concept on the show, but it's not something we've covered in nearly enough depth.

So tell me why it's such an interesting discovery on nutrition and fitness and feel free not to spare me the kind of gory scientific terminology and details because I really love that stuff. 

Brad Pilon: Absolutely. All right. So from a science point of view, and just purely from a sort of a nutritional interest point of view, intermittent fasting gave us this concept that it was all right to occasionally take a break from eating, right?

So we're right now, most of the people who'd be listening to this cause they always have access to a computer are in an area where they have pretty quick access. To food at any given time they want, you could probably go out and find something to eat. And so, because of that, we're in a sort of a situation.

We are constantly in the fed state, right. We eat all the way up until bedtime and then we get up and most of us eat before we've been taking our morning shower. Right. We just keep going. And there's a group of us who probably get up sometime in the middle of the night to also eat some more. We're just fed.

We're just constantly feeding. And our body is constantly dealing with a massive influx of stuff. Right. It comes in through your mouth and then the majority of it enters into your body from your GI tract and it's got to be dealt with, so your body's working constantly to deal with this stuff, right? So it's got these micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals, and it's allocating those two enzymes and it's got these.

Big macronutrients, right? These carbs, these fats, these proteins that are basically just our version of hydrocarbons, right? Just big, long carbon chains that it's got to deal with. And so if it's not burning these carbons, right, and these, these carbon chains, they gotta be put somewhere. Right. Cause they can't just disappear.

We haven't gotten to the point yet where we can just make actual matter disappear. So it's got to go somewhere. So either it leaves your body or it stays in your body and that's constant work. It's going on every minute of every day, you're eating your, body trying to figure out where the hell to put this stuff.

Then intermittent fasting comes along and it's kind of like, Hey, what happens? Just, just curious question. What happens when we stop eating and you know, the available research and there's quite an extensive amount of research. Believe it or not, this isn't well, it's new to us in nutrition and eating from a scientific point of view, intermittent fasting.

Isn't that new because we have lots of data because half the time fasting was the placebo, right? In, in sort of various trials. Right. So you can go back to that research and go, Oh, well, I'll tell you exactly what happens. Your body starts to fall out of the fed state. Starts to move into the fasted state and then you have this massive change in hormones and enzyme levels.

Instead of now deal with, you know, putting things away for later use. Now they're pulling things back out to be used because nothing's coming in through your mouth. Well, okay. That from a dieters point of view, that sounds. Kind of ideal, right? Because most of the stuff we're pulling out to be used is body fat.

And then, you know, we stopped, we thought, wait a sec, hold on. Because we've read our fitness magazines and we know that the stuff you lose first is muscle isn't it. Science came back and said, no, guys, it's really simple measurement called an RQ or respiratory quotient. We've been doing this measurement since like the beginning of time.

And it clearly shows it. The longer you go without eating the more fat you're burning. And if that's not true, we have to go back and start from scratch and nutritional sciences. It's kind of one of our fundamental measurements. So then we went, Oh, okay, well, huh. So I don't eat. And I just start burning more and more fat.

This kind of sounds really interesting. And what happened was for a large amount of people who. You know, are good at dieting, really like the monotony and they liked the measuring and they liked the stopwatch going off every four hours to tell you when he, they went, Oh, that's kind of cool. You know, I'll read a couple of articles about it, but I'll pass.

But for the rest of us, the majority of us who hate the idea of never eating the foods we love or eating on a schedule or measuring stuff, we thought, wait, wait a sec. This sounds interesting. So you can tell me, I can take a break every once in a while and burn some fat. And it's essentially like taking all weeks worth of dieting and squeezing it.

And the one little time I'm in and that's basically how fast things started getting very, very popular is it was, I'm not going to say a lazy person's approach to dieting, which is kind of, you know, the way I view it for me personally, but more for someone who just goes for the easiest possible solution.

Right? So you could diet every single day. Or you could die at once or twice a week for a shorter amount of time, but we're talking diet as in zero calories and get the same result. So that was the main push, right? The main realization that this has application for the average person. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. But it almost sounds like it's a calorie in calories out thing and creating a caloric deficit, but there's a lot more to it.

Brad Pilon: Right. I mean, there is the ketogenic thing.

Jonathan Levi: There's tell me about that a little bit.

Brad Pilon:  Well, you have to divide up the actual weight loss component from the actual health or metabolic component. So the weight loss is, is literally if you're breathing and not eating, you're losing weight and it just that's it, right.

There's no more magic that you need to know. Other than if the carbon dioxide is being breathed out, you're losing weight. It's the rest of the stuff that made the number of fascinating, really, really interesting because that was the concept of if we're in a constant state, Of overabundance, right? If you're constantly shoving more carbs or more fat or even more protein, more everything into your body than as it used to, is it just lowering calories back down that has the full health and metabolic benefit, or is it these periods of.

Nothing. Right. This kind of resets where you actually give your body a chance to not deal with, let's say sugar, not deal with the sugar load. So instead of just lowering the sugar load, now we have periods of time where the net sugar intake is, is zero. And it's very different concept than just simply saying, Kate, go back to a lower carbohydrate or lower sugar or lower fat, whatever you want to do.

Diet, this is now a situation where your body has a chance to recover from the periods of overabundance and it's something that dieting has never really done. So we quickly looked through fasting and went well. It's just as a calorie in calories out thing, which is almost completely true for the weight loss part.

Right. But for the metabolic effects for a deciding where that weight comes from and be deciding, is there health properties to imminent fasting, possibly beyond what we've seen with dieting before? And the answer is most likely, and it comes from the idea of you're taking these large. A true break from total intake and giving your body this recovery time to adapt or to repair from the damage it's been done.

Jonathan Levi: I see. So damage, not just from things like free radicals, but also from wear and tear. 

Brad Pilon: Exactly. It's a lot of work. If you think about the constant fed state, it's a wear and tear on the entire system, you could argue a lot of diseases are just from the wear and tear of dealing with a specific macronutrient in access for chronic periods of time.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. So we're saying, all right, well then. Take a chunk of time out and recover from that. So that seems to be where we're getting some of the extra health benefits. 

Sounds like you're saying, forget dieting. I can eat whatever I want and lose weight if I'm fasting. And that sounds almost too good to be true, too.

Brad Pilon: Good to be true. Well, you can't eat whatever you want. You just can't eat as much of it as you want. Right? So we have evidence from a span of different diet protocols. They all have at least some mediocre benefit, as long as. There is calorie restriction. Now the calorie restriction can be different depending on the makeup of the diet, but they'll all work to some degree.

The main issue you run into is the overbite. So it isn't a fast than eat. Like it's the day after Halloween for a couple of days, then fast, you know, then eat like it's the day after Thanksgiving with leftover, you know, there has to be responsible eating in between no matter how long you fast for you can't make up for just.

Gluttony afterward. Yeah. So there is a level of responsibility in between the fact that you're always going to have to take part in. 

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. So you talked a little bit about allowing the body to recover and then to reactivate these different processes that our bodies are able to do. What are some of those processes?

I mean, what's happening in my body. If I fast, or if I'm used to fasting, that's not happening to someone who's in a fully fed state. 

Brad Pilon: The main thing is the lipolysis or the release of fat from your fat stores and using that fat as a fuel, it's something that everybody does. The difference being is that the majority of people are using fat as a fuel in that fat was just the fat that just came into your body a couple hours ago from your food.

That's ketosis, right? Ketosis is part of fat loss and is not the entirety of losing body fat. It's one of the processes that goes along with it. But the main thing is just being able to move in and out up from a high RQ where you're burning mostly sugar down to a, you know, a lower RQ where you're burning mostly fat and being able to move up and down, people have used the term metabolic flexibility to kind of describe that your ability to move back and forth through these different metabolic States.

Jonathan Levi: Uh, huh. So kind of like you're a Toyota Prius. You have a choice of which energy source, depending on where you are on the day and what your needs are.

Brad Pilon: I would have picked a cooler hybrid, but yeah. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: I mean, you're not quite the Tesla, right. But not quite the Tesla. Yeah. You just learned the other day, which I never knew.

And I've been into this stuff for a while. There is a process in the body by which your body can actually take lactic acid. I guess, run it through the liver or run it through, I believe it's the liver and break it down and then reuse it as well. 

Brad Pilon: Glucose, uh, Cori cycle. It can do that with there's a cycle for lactic acid.

There's a cycle for Ruby as well. Maybe it does a couple. Yeah. So that's one of the ways that exercise kind of comes into play. When we talk about fasting and just, you know, the ability to maintain. Your blood sugar, which is so one thing that people always worry about with fast, even though they're brief, and one of the answers that there are multiple sort of small areas where your body can gather up some more sources to make glucose out of.

The other thing is that you know, when we're dealing with like a 24-hour faster under. Chances are your liver? Glycogen never gets down to zero, right? You're still just getting rid of some of the lectins it's already been stored for just this scenario. Sure. In muscles, muscles, and your liver now with the muscle stuff is for your muscles.

A little greedy guys, keep it themselves, right? So the glycogen in your right bicep, that's just your right biceps glycogen. So that's why you can come out of a fast and then be for the most part glycogen full in the muscle groups. But your liver will be greatly diminished unless you are training during the fast interesting.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, it's kinda cool. It's very cool. I actually have a trainer. I have a couple of trainers who they'll find out that I've been fasting before a workout and they just like beat me over the head. And they're like, why you're an idiot? Why didn't you eat something I'm like, actually, cause I'm trying to burn off that muscle glycogen, you know, I've been burning the liver glycogen off all day, but the muscle glycogen, what are your thoughts on working out in the fasted state?

Brad Pilon: I mean, I do it. So I'm not a performance athlete. I'm 38 if I miss my draft year by about 20 years. So I'm not going pro in any sports, the Olympics, uh, haven't called, and there's not any sport that I'm overly good at. So I'm not a performance athlete. I am a recreational athlete. Who's mostly interested in not being sore and broken when I get older and training for vanity.

I mean, that's just what it is. So my training is not. That's intense. Right? I do not end in a pile of blood and sweat at the end of every workout in the gym. And I don't really care if I curled the forties or 30 fives right. On any given workout, as long as I challenged the muscle. So I train most of the time in the facet state, just because that's kind of how my scheduled workout.

If I had a choice. It wouldn't matter. I'll trade fat, I'll train facet. I'll train at the exact time where I really, really want to train, because I think that psychology of actually being pumped for the workout is way more important than that. Trying to time it with some magical period. Right. So I don't generally train in the middle of a fast, uh, the way my fastest setup.

I'm always sleeping in the middle of one. Right. So I've either probably ate in the last hour or two, or I'm about to eat another couple hours. Right. So I don't really concern myself with it too much because I know I'm going to. Eat to recover and repair muscle. And then I haven't found any real detriment in my personal strength or, you know, zest in the gym, whether I'm training at the end of a fast or in the middle of the day.

Jonathan Levi: I see, let me ask this. I almost forgot to ask, well, there's two other elements. I think we haven't covered. And I have to admit, I did a little bit of homework before. So one is the idea of insulin sensitivity, which comes back to what you were talking about. We're constantly fed our bodies are no longer. I mean, what is insulin insensitivity?

Brad Pilon: When people talk about that, it's measured a number of different ways, but the most basic way to describe this is just the amount of insulin that's being released into your bloodstream by your body. Relative to the amount of glucose in your blood, and then the change in that glucose level. So what you'd like to see is an elevated glucose level.

Your body goes all right, releases some insulin and the glucose levels go down at a very defined curve that we've gotten textbooks, et cetera. If you are insulin insensitive, that exact same process happens. You know, glucose comes out and then maybe a bit more glucose as needed. Before your instance, like, all right, fine.

Okay. Can the gear here and your insulin goes up and then the glucose goes down at a bit of a slower rate than we'd like, right. And that would be glucose insensitivity. And then quite the opposite is being highly glucose-sensitive, which is just the insulin kicks in a bit earlier. And the glucose drops a bit quicker or at least much closer to the line.

Jonathan Levi: And we'd like, I see. So you want to be in that happy medium. 

Brad Pilon: Yeah, you really do. There's so much. Going on with insulin sensitivity. We're really getting to the point now where we can measure it, not just whole body, but we can measure sort of lean versus fat, but we're going to have to get farther because I mean, specifically after fasting, you have a situation where your muscles, technically, if you fasted not for an extended period of time, let's say 20 to 24 hours.

You fast for 20, 24 hours. Your liver glycogen is going to be low, but your muscle glacier is going to be high. So you eat something because you're done you're fast. Glucose comes into your body. Insulin goes up, but now you've got all these different components, right? Your muscles are sitting at going, like, I don't need that.

Am I full? I'm good. Yeah. Your liver is sitting going, like I know I'm not even going to let anybody else touch this stuff. And then your fat sitting there going like, guys, I'm the one who shrank here. So can I have some tea? So different components of your body will have different. Insulin sensitivities, depending on what's been going on, that affect the speed at which glucose leaves your bloodstream.

And then depending on which one of those compartments you measured, you're going to come up with kind of different answers as to what a person's sensitivity is like. So not quite there, but we're getting to the point where we're really going to have this sort of multi-factorial picture of insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity, where we'll look at specific organs.

Muscles and fat, maybe even different fat compartments, and really get a good picture of what's going on. 

Jonathan Levi: I see. So breakdown on a continuum for me, because you hear terms like insulin sensitivity, you obviously hear about type one type two diabetes, and then you hear about metabolic syndrome. What are the differences practically between those things, depending on who you're talking to?

Brad Pilon: Right. So diabetes type one or type two have very defined characteristics. Oh, sorry. They used to anyway, right? Yeah. Everything used to be so much simpler type one was just a very simple piece was obese, was obese, you know? Yeah. Right. So let me try and get this. This one is a lack of insulin production.

Typically from birth, you're dealing with, um, damage to the pancreas or the eyelids or his lips, depending on how you want to say it of Langerhans. Wow. I think I've got that right too. I'm not sure. But anyway, the actual cells that produce limbs in your body, okay. The other type of diabetes is the one where the body just stopped responding to that insulin.

They have kind of a combo where your body stops responding for so long that now incent production is being compromised. You have the. You know, gestational diabetes, which is diabetes that occurs during pregnancy. There's diabetes that has to do with growth hormone levels, right? So you have growth hormone-related diabetes.

Now we're finding out that there's actually testosterone-related diabetes as well. Right? You have metabolic syndrome, which is a level of insulin insensitivity combined with high blood glucose levels, sort of chronically combined with obesity. Then you just have compromised insulin sensitivity levels.

Wow. Right. So it's a very, very large and complex kind of, well, it makes sense. 

Jonathan Levi: Wow. Right. So it's a very, very large and complex kind of, well, it makes sense.  I mean, this glucose right, is the entire driving energy of everything. We do all of our energy sources. There's only one kind of energy our body can use and that's glucose. It all breaks down to that. Every kind of energy we consume goes into that.

So it makes sense that there would be many different ways and many different problems with that system. It's like the engine in your car. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of different ways to generate power, things like that.  

Brad Pilon: So, and the day you want combustion, right? 

Jonathan Levi: So at the end of the day, you want that glucose broken down.

Brad Pilon: The fun thing with insulin sensitivity, again, not the fun thing, but the issue with that one is it seems to be a very acute measurement. We have the H one odd I'm blanking on the eight 20 BC H one B. Anyway, we have long-term measurements of kind of what your blood glucose levels have been. So we can tell you if they've been chronically elevated or not, But insulin sensitivity.

It varies throughout the day. It varies based on meals. It varies on exercise levels. So it can even peak and B, you can look into resistance, then it can come back down and lower. And now you're really sensitive, right? So I say it's a difficult thing to really correlate, right? You'd have to have sort of that chronic long-term.

Jonathan Levi: Measurements with a baseline. Of course, they've got kind of a picture of what's going on there, but let me ask this and kind of come back to the two benefits. I think we didn't cover fascinating is supposed to help with insulin sensitivity. Absolutely. That's one of those 

Brad Pilon: Absolutely. That's one of those systems completely true. But if you were to measure right after a fast, especially if you didn't train during the fast and liver is depleted, but muscle is full of glycogen.

You may actually find depending on. The timeframe you measured, how quickly, right after a fast you start measuring personal might actually look insulin insensitive, right? Because your blood is still full of free fatty acids because you've been releasing body fat for fuel. So the minute you decide, all right, and then fasting and having a bagel, all those free fatty acids just don't disappear.

Right? They've got to be. Shunted away and put away again. Right? So your blood is full of free fatty acids that need to be put away, but you're now introducing glucose and fats and proteins and fiber back into your body. So if you were to measure in that, you know, that first hour or two, you might actually look insulin insensitive, but then if you chronically follow up, you're like, Oh wait, no, hold on.

It looks like insulin sensitivity is actually improving in the long term. Exactly. For the reasons, we've mentioned. So it all has to do with measurement time, et cetera. It's a. Science is fun. Right? 

Jonathan Levi: I love it. And so that's a really huge, important point. I mean, your body has one engine, which is metabolizing glucose, and you don't want anything to be wrong with that process.

But another one that I've personally experimented with is mental clarity. So not only do you not have all the blood going to your stomach and your body focusing so much on digesting, as you said. But also your body kind of kicks up some of these hormones and you become more alert. You become more aware under the pretense, you know, your body thinking.

This means I'm going to be more likely to find food. If I turn up the mental faculties, have you experienced that as well?

Brad Pilon:  I've experienced it. It's an area. I wish I did more research on the mental aspects of fasting. I mean, my original research was. Purely metabolic and weight loss. So I've experienced it.

I enjoy it, I do my best writing when I'm fasted agreed. So I experienced it myself. I couldn't really tell you the proposed mechanisms behind it though, but I do know that it's something that's often reported with fasting. 

Jonathan Levi: Well, and it makes sense as a survival mechanism, for sure. Yeah. Let me ask you this bread is this for everybody.

Brad Pilon: Depends on how you word the lessons we learned from intermittent fasting. Absolutely the fact that you can pick and choose when to eat. You can eat when you are hungry, you don't have to eat if you're not hungry, save a lot of time. Yeah. The specific timeframes, the Aesop beats once or twice a week for 24 hours, 24, it might not be for everybody or the 16 hours every day.

They might not be everybody, but the lessons and the ability to adapt it to yourself, that for sure is for everybody. And even people who are Contraindicated to fasting, you know, whether it's diabetic or some other medical condition, the lessons within fasting are still are helpful.  

Jonathan Levi: I love that. So it sounds like there's some adaptability and scalability that I would want to ask.

And we'd like to give homework for people to experiment with, of course, without taking any liability. What I'd like to ask is. Could you break down a sort of idealized baseline schedule because personally, I try to fast one to two times a week for 18 to 24 hours, but I've also been told by Ben Greenfield that he does a 12-hour fast every day?

So the question is what does an ideal week look like in terms of frequency? And before I have your answer, I'm going to hit pause real, real quick. Just get the audience hooked on that really interesting question and mentioned our episode sponsors. All right at this point, I just want to take a quick second and hit pause to let you guys know that this episode is brought to you by on it.

I first discovered Onnit through Tim Ferris, who also swears by their stuff, and I've had the chance to try a bunch of their products from their chewable melatonin. To their alpha brain balanced neurotropic, and even new mood, which helps reduce stress and improve your mood. But on it has much, much more to offer from ultra high-quality protein to fitness equipment, and more.

Please take a moment and show support for the show by visiting JLE.VI/onnit and using the coupon code getonnit to save 10%, all right back to the show.

Jonathan Levi: All right. We're back here with Mr. Brad Pilon. Who's been chewing on a question about the idealized schedule for intermittent fasting. We want to experiment with it. We want to play with it. We want to see if it works for us. So Brad, take it away. 

Brad Pilon: All right. So obviously the answer is, should give here is for me it's once or twice a week. 20 to 24 hours long, the fastest divided between two days. Right? So we'd start today at 2:00 PM. We'd fast until tomorrow at a, roughly 2:00 PM.

Mostly because that's eat, stop, eat. That's the book I wrote, but the actual true answer is it's just a couple of factors we're gonna put into play here. The more frequently you want to fast, the lower, your fast should be. So if you're an everyday kind of person, when you're like bread, just. I want the monotony of every day.

My life is craving this. I'm a pattern type of person. It needs to be every day. All right, cool. You're fast. They're going to be 12 to 16 hours, right? That's very good. Sort of everyday thing. 16 on the high side, 12 is nice. And the low side, I remember this is also included. The time you're sleeping. So you're already, I'm guessing fasting for, let's say six to eight hours, depending on how much sleep you get.

So that 12-hour one is just extending that window. Right? So 10 at night you're like, okay, I'm eating for the day. Nothing good is going to happen. I'm going to sit down and watching suits right now. Nothing good is gonna happen. If I start eating, cause it's going to be ice cream and chips, then I'm just going to blow the day.

So I'm just going to say I'm done. And the next day you just start back up at 10. That's kind of a cool way to look at it. Right? Okay. Then you go all the way up to 16. Now if you're not quite an everyday person, maybe your every other day, right? So you still want the sort of routine you want it to be, you know, every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, a clockwork kind of thing.

Cool. You can go 16 to 20 with that one, but I think that's reasonable. Then you're like, okay, Brad, actually, I'm with you. I like once, twice a week. I love the flexibility of it. You know, I want to plan the fast on Tuesday, but if something comes up, I want to just be able to move it to Wednesday. Great. I want that kind of flexibility.

Jonathan Levi: There's your 20 to 24-hour fast. That's a once a week. 

Brad Pilon: Fast. Yeah, once, maybe twice. Right? That kind of thing. And then that's kind of my limit. Like if you want to push it up to 36, cause you're at, you know, a very infrequent faster, you're kind of, uh, I might do this once or twice a month kind of thing. But that's cool.

Just play with it and experiment with it. But that's my general idea. So the more frequent, the lower, the duration of your fast.

Jonathan Levi: Go off of your lifestyle list to your calendar. If someone has the discipline to choose between those, I mean, what is the idealized schedule? 

Brad Pilon: Yeah, I see that. Okay. My bias is once or twice a week, because what I found is just with Aesop eating again, reminding everybody I'm crazy biased here is that people seem to be well if they just.

The people who embrace that flexibility, the idea of it being, you know, 24 ish hours and then once or twice a week, they're the ones who seem to be able to just maintain fasting for years. Right. It's just what they do to maintain their body weight, fasting, responsible, eating. They just sort of becomes a flow in what they do.

I find that people who tend to try to fix all their problems in the world's problems, by just fascinating, as much as they can, it becomes just like a diet, and they eventually burn out. Right. So the thing about once or twice, and I like it is it allows for mess-ups and oopses, right? It allows you to think in terms of, all right, my cousin, Sally is getting married on Saturday.

I'm going to the wedding. I'm not fasting. Perfect. Right? Like I just I'm allowing myself to do this. Whereas if you're a die-hard. Every day faster plus crazy diet schemes. Well, Sally's wedding sucks and it messes up your program. Right. And so you're kind of going to the wedding feeling guilty. And what does a human being do when they go to somewhere feeling guilty about their eating, they eat everything, right.

We don't just kind of have a little nibble. We're the ones at the buffet, fending other people off with a fork, right? Like it's that kind of thing. So I find that just the flexibility of once or twice a week also allows people to then. Still have to focus on there. You and I talked earlier about like responsible eating, which is kind of a cop-out of me telling people how to eat, but with once or twice, you're taking a break from eating right.

Every so often you're disrupting the eating pattern. With this occasional break with more frequent fasting. What I find is you can get to the point, especially people who go crazy and do like 24 hours fast every day or whatever. The crazy thing is, they're taking a break from fast. I didn't eat for a little bit and go right back into fasting.

Right. I just don't know how sustainable that is or even how good that is, especially for the people who are very obese and let's have some, you know, probably some med underlying metabolic issues just. From the city or the people who are very, very lean, it just don't have the energy stores to cope with that much not eating.

Right. So a big fan of the average person, trying to just get, sort of get back into the beach, ready shape and just be really happy with their bodies 20 to 24 hours once or twice a week is what I, I recommend. 

Jonathan Levi: So it's,  it's the upbeat it's very clearly not stop eating. Exactly. Couldn't say it better. I love that.

I used to have a friend in business school who had to eat pretty much every three to four hours. He was a bodybuilder type guy. And if he didn't, he'd get super testy, hungry, fatigued, all that kind of nasty stuff. And we sort of knew that. He wasn't kidding around this. Wasn't a joke when he busted out a Tupperware full of chicken and veggies in the middle of an exam, and he starts wailing on this, like over his Scantron.

So I guess my question would be, what would you say to anyone who thinks that maybe they couldn't possibly survive without. Eating every six hours.

Brad Pilon:  That was me. I mean, I've told this story before, but in university or college Canadian University, my girlfriend now wife used to have to carry like MetroTech protein bars in her purse because if I didn't eat every couple of hours because we went shopping or something and I didn't have to, I was irritable and I was tired and I was fatigued.

So I was completely there. Right. And it's a lot of it is food expectations and food want. Oh, interesting. I tell the story a lot about. No experiences I've had when I first started fasting and really kind of realizing what was going on in the connection between my head and the desire for food is I was back in my hometown after my second year of University.

So that kind of summer break and I wanted an RBS. And not early hamburgers, like Ruthie sandwiches. Oh boy. They're awesome. Right. And so I came from a University town where every single thing is 24 hours. Right. So it was like seven at night. We're not talking late. I got in my car, I am going for RBS. This is going to be quick.

And I think I just finished a workout. Right. So what better to have an RB? And I drove to the armies and it was closed. And I don't know, heartbreak closes, it closes at six. Nobody closes a fast food restaurant at six. Right? So I'm not from the population of a small town, like 250,000 on the street where the RB was, there are a dozen fast-food chains.

Right. I'd also was living back with my parents at the time. So it's not like the fridge wasn't full of food, but I was irate and hungry and irritable because I wanted it. Arby's, I didn't want anything else. Right. And so that's kind of goes a long way for when you're expecting to eat and you can't eat another great example.

Is I fast for 24 hours once or twice a week for the last decade, right? Like this is not new to me. If you're like half-hour late for lunch with me, I'm angry. And it's not because it was inconsiderate because I'm hungry cause I was expecting to eat. Right. So that expectation is something that it takes a long time to break.

My first couple of fasts, there was a, I don't know if it's still out now a Gatorade, it was like a lighter G2 or something. It was like a watered-down version of Gatorade. I carry that around with me just in case, just in case, just in case. Right. So it takes a bit to really realize that a lot of what we perceive as hunger is just.

Really wanting to eat. So it's more psychological than anything. Yeah, it doesn't mean that the thing about that is it doesn't mean it's not real, right. It's not like I was faking being irritable and pissy like I was irritable and pissy for sure. Right. And I felt hungry because it's phallic reflects you have X food expectation.

Is it quite a real phenomenon? Right. So by me wanting food. I triggered my body to prepare to eat right. There was actually a pre-meal slight increase in insulin. Exactly. So I'm not saying it's not real at all. What I'm saying is it's just, as it was trained into you, you can untrain it to a degree. 

Jonathan Levi: That's very interesting because when I learned about intermittent fasting, I think a lot about the paleolithic man and what our bodies are designed and evolved to do.

And you think about it. Also with the one or two fasts a week. I mean, if the tribe and I take down a wildebeest, it's going to keep for two or three days, we're going to eat well for two or three days. And then that's it, right? It's spoiled without refrigeration. You don't have access to food every day. And without greenhouses and GMOs, you don't have access to veggies even every day, right.

It's kind of catches catch comes. You're eating a lot of shrubs and low calorie foods until you find the next kill or the next banana tree that happens to be right. Whatever it is. And this is also another thing that our bodies are not evolved, I guess, to expect food. We're evolved to say, Holy crap, I found food now I'm ready.

And I'm preparing my body to consume it. But thousands of years ago, there was really, probably no expectation that I'm going to eat at this specific hour. 

Brad Pilon: Yeah, that would be nice.

Jonathan Levi: Would be nice. The world to be should arrive in half an hour of sun.

Brad Pilon: So he's being inconsiderate PreK right now. We need to eat him.

Yeah, no, I agree. It was just so available. It's just so easy now. I mean, there isn't much in life. It's as easy as. Finding food for people who have, so your basic needs met, you've got shelter and you've got some money foods there for you. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. I mean, even this is a terrible example, but you look at like the homeless population, there's huge access to food.

You can get a hamburger for a buck, a dollar menu, right? So like you're dealing more with exposure or you're dealing more with alcoholism in that population. Then you're dealing with actual hunger, which I think is telling just about how available food is. Not underplaying the horrors and the travesty of the homeless population or anything like that.

But it is telling that throughout evolution feeding ourselves was one of the hardest things we did. And now it's one of the easiest. Exactly Brad, let me ask this. You mentioned protein bars, which reminded me that you actually started your career in the supplement industry. And I guess my main question is I'm curious what you learned while rubbing elbows with folks like Arnold Schwartzenegger and the most elite researchers and top athletes in the world.

Brad Pilon: Hi, it was great. It's a good time. So it was about six, seven years that I spent in the industry, and in all that time was in research and development. So I learned some interesting things myself. Like I am not a marketer. I can't market worth crap because of my love for science. It gets to the point where you can't really communicate with people as, as well as you'd like to really talking with key researchers, you realize there is a very large divide because is going to have really hard to explain.

Marketing drives public interest, right? Public interest kind of then drives what people write about in magazines, because you want people to buy the magazines, right? Magazines tend to drive even a larger curiosity. Curiosity kind of comes back and drives ideas for science things to look into the problem is.

By the time, the idea is kit science and they're like, this is interesting. People think this, we should investigate it. And then you investigate it. And then, you know, well, you go for funding and you do your proposal. And then by the time you're like, I have my studies almost done. I'm writing it up. It should be published in a couple of months.

Interest has moved on. So it was a very big disconnect where, you know, science comes out two years and go like, Oh guys, we actually have the answers that, and everybody's looking around going. Dude, we're on to something else while you're talking about that.

Jonathan Levi: Still what's an example of that. 

Brad Pilon: During your time, a couple of years, examples, I find leucine M tour branch chain, amino acids, all that was very, very interesting research.

That was really moving at a very quick rate until people kind of got, but still moving at a great rate, but we kind of got bored and moved on from it. Right? Couple of people had a really good blog post or two about M tour. A couple of great supplements were launched that made a lot of money. And then.

You know, something company was kind of tapped out and realized let's move to pump products and vasodilators so they'd launched those and then, Oh yeah, the big N O Xplode thing. Yeah. So then, you know, online science log, we're really kind of commentators. Right. So then we're like, all right, we're going to look into this Argentine not connection.

So we go on about that and we start writing about it. And then mainstream media is like, starts writing about it. And then somewhere in the midst of that, a new product comes out. We've moved on again. Meanwhile, science is like, guys, I found some cool stuff on that inventory you're talking about.

Everybody's like, dude do it. But you're so far behind, right? You're like season one, season four. Right? So we won't spoil spoilers for you, but you got to stop talking. And so there's this giant disconnect and that was a really frustrating part. In working in R and D for the Southern companies is because everybody demands that Suffolk companies do research.

So Southern company, like fine. All right, we're going to throw tons of money at research. It's not cheap. No, it's not cheap, but it's slow. Right? So it's almost like it's forcing the company to spend money that inevitably hurts their ability to launch on time to be competitive in the marketplace. So then they come back.

The guys in research development were going, like, I don't under, there's no way to speed this up. Like, unless we just move everything in-house. So do the research ourselves, but then it loses that credibility. Right? So it was a very disconnected thing where you looked at what the public into consumers were yelling and screaming for, but at the same time looking at what we're doing.

So then we had to do. Crystal ball type stuff and go, okay, we're going to try to run four or five different trials that are out there thinking and hope that by the time one of them are done, the market's ready for one of the ideas shoot where the Target's going. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, it can, you can have one of the best ideas ever with the right research, but if the market's not there right now, Right.

Brad Pilon: It's very hard to launch. Yeah. So you have finally done some research and you realize that Holy crap, boron, and smile acts, or some of that early 80 prices, one of them actually works really well, but the rest of the world into creating. You're like, Aw, but it doesn't matter how good my research is right now, because everybody's moved on. 

 And that's an interesting thing because I remember creating, being all the rage. When I was a high school athlete, it was controversial. Where does it come from? Is it safe? It's causing your muscles to swell with water, all this stuff. By the time the research came out and now it's, it's generally acknowledged one of the most effective supplements.

Also for cognition, but for ATP synthesis, all that grace everyone's like, I don't care, man. Either. It's already part of my stack. And so the kind of short-term profits, real gains of being the early runner are gone or people have just moved on to more extreme stuff.

Jonathan Levi: The other problem is the market changes, right?

Brad Pilon: So your research finally is coming out, we're creating is the thing, but in that period of time, The manufacturer of creatine becomes so effective. The cost is dropped so low to commodity. Yeah. There's no money to be made. There's no money to be made in it because you're sitting there going Holy cow creatine works awesome because I was selling it at 80 bucks.

You know, a tub at about an 80% margin. I'm going to get back into this and you go, Oh, it's on the shelves at Walmart for $19. Right. There's nothing. And at that company, it has a Walmart shelf space. Their volume is so high that they can live off the three bucks they're making per product. And they're going as a small person who doesn't have the Walmart shelf space.

You're like, man, I'm screwed. There's a massive disconnect. And you know, it's funny because the supplement companies are always the evil bad guys in this, and you never kind of blame the marketplace or yourself, but I can promise you that when they sit around a boardroom table, Right. Yes. They think of how we get a market to capture the audience interest, et cetera.

But they also sit there and go guys, I want to make the best muscle-building supplement possible. And then the R and D department and the marketing department within the constraints of what they're actually allowed to put into that product attempts to do that. Right. And the problem is, is that it's, you know, Obviously the marketing doesn't help by driving up the consumer's expectation and then it doesn't always match, but let's face it.

I mean, with the protein powder, you can only do so much to help someone gain muscle. Right. And if you ever got a supplement that had. Drug-like effects. Well, it would have drug-like effects because remember, and drug-like banning I'd affected just the effects we didn't like, right. They're not actually classified into the drug as the side effects.

So if you get something that has a ton of, of really big. High magnitude effects. Some of those effects will probably be undesirable. Right. So they can't actually do that. Right? Like they don't have the effect that just go like, okay, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna do a protein powder and no one's ever thought of this.

We're going to add decade into it. Right. Like they can't do that for our listeners.

Jonathan Levi: Is it like an early form of long outlawed steroid?

Brad Pilon: I mean, in the eighties, this stuff wasn't legal. But it's what Arnold used parently.

Jonathan Levi: I've heard that quote, unquote, I'll never get him on this show. 

Brad Pilon: Dammit. He, that he'd be on the show for Sherry, but yeah, so that was my experience of it was watching the frustration of the supplement industry, trying to launch products that were profitable and meet the demands of the consumer, which was like, obviously I want to look like Arnold, Nate weeks.

Guys, you have to have research to prove it works. And yours has to be cheaper and better-tasting everybody else's Oh, and I don't want it to be four pills of serving. I'd like you to get down to two, please. And then could you have this happen in a month? Yeah. And I don't want gas either. I don't want gas better, not taste funky.

Right. So ridiculous. And the fun thing about that is even when people find a supplement that they actually. Think works. They're not loyal, right? Loyal. No, this is like, it's the best-tasting thing they've ever had and it's actually kind of working for them. It fits their budget, new one. That's shiny. Right?

I'm so guilty of that. Yeah. It's difficult, there's a reason why we say new and improved and advance on our products every six months is because. That's what we need to do to get people, to buy the bloody product again. Right. 

Jonathan Levi: Well, as the people think that the science is moving much faster than it is as we've just learned it.

Yeah, exactly. Let me ask this. But I just released an article a couple of weeks ago about the seven supplements that in my experience have actually made a difference among tens of thousands of products and the hundreds that I've tried. Although I really wish I'd consulted you first, but let me ask which supplements in your mind and from a research perspective, Actually make a difference. And which ones are pure BS, hype?

Brad Pilon: All right. So creating makes a difference. Ephedrine. Obviously, it makes a difference, but that's one of those effects side effects things, right? 

Jonathan Levi: Ephedrine is the speed for those not familiar. It's tainted release.

Brad Pilon:  Yup. I think Yohimbine is in there as well. Has multiple effects.

Not only combine. Yes. It's the alkaloid from Yohimbe B you'll see it, it used to be in a lot of fat burgers. I don't think it's there as much anymore. It probably got banned, but it was another one that obviously a lot of the bad ones had effects just some of them were not so good. Sure. I think a lot of the new tropics.

Have a lot of potentials. Those are sort of your new age, brain drugs. You're, you're been posting your Huperzine, et cetera. I think they've got some play. I think the future will be probiotics. It's young. I mean, this is a young area and I think there's. Harm to be done just as much as there is good, but I think if the science keeps going to the direction, it's going prebiotics, and probiotics are going to be very mainstream consumable.

Definitely. I have high hopes for green products. If anything is basically an insurance-type thing or at least a way for people to get their vegetables and yeah. It means kind of thing. Yeah. It's a problem with vegetables and no one wants to talk about it is they suck. Is that the, you know, you eat a large amount of them and then you're bloated and you're in pain for a lot of people, not everybody.

Right. But you know, you hear that asparagus is great for you. So you fry a bunch of asparagus that heat a giant plateful, and you lay on the couch dying in pain. Right? So some people just can't handle big doses, whereas things like athletic greens tend to come in and help with that. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. And that's, I mean, largely because our food is real nutrient-poor.

These days it's made in hothouses, it's picked early it's fertilized with only NPK. So, yeah, there's no nutrients left in any 

Brad Pilon: of it. It's just fiber and water to you're cramming, amazing amounts. Sure. Areas that not completely bunk, but you just have to be really aware of are when you get into muscle building.

Supplements. And I've just realized that the muscle-building process it's very complex. It's not as simple as stimulating mTOR and boom muscle, right? Like there's just so many layers involved, whether you're dealing with the inflammation response, triggering satellite cell activation, and then how the phosphorylation comes into play.

And then all the checks and balances involved in muscle building. You always have to think of your muscle building supplements as. Permissive, right. It's your actual training? That's eliciting the response. And then you're just sort of subsidizing, you said that with the supplements, trying to think that you can just sort of get away with just supplements that build muscle the same way that say testosterone would.

I think that's an area that was fairly shortsighted. So you just sure. It's not that they don't work. Just taper your expectations and realize that it's the stuff you do in the gym. That's really driving the initiation of that process. And then the supplements and the food are kind of what. I'll allow it to reach its full potential.

Jonathan Levi: I love that. It goes with the saying gains aren't made in the gym.

Brad Pilon: Exactly. Yeah. There started there and then you got to finish it off everywhere else.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, exactly. Everywhere else. Yeah. Bread on your site. It's something caught my eye, which is you talk about reaching an epiphany of something called quote, health, attraction, and quotes.

Brad Pilon: What does that mean? All right. So we're looking at what people want, right. And it's outside of the giant vanity game that is health and fitness. Right now, there is a level of just wanting health. Right. And it's really weird because the thing about health is that it's really bloody hard to actually define or quantify, quantify to happiness, right?

You're like, Oh, we're actually stopping to think about it. These are some pretty tough things to deal with. Right? So health attraction to me is, is more of a mindset. It's realizing that you know if what you're trying to do here is this weird sort of health, happiness connection. Right. Then a lot of it is just.

Allowing it to happen and bringing it to use. As an example, I'll give you, is that the, I'm not sure that a struggle, monotonous eating every four hours, getting up in the middle of the night to eat competition prep, where you're training all the time. You're not seeing your friends because you're in diet mode and, and, you know, nothing tastes as good as abs look and it's, you know, people call it an obsession.

I call determination that lifestyle if it's actually. Draining you, I'm not sure if that's healthy. Right. And really what you want to do is attract in that and realize what is actually healthy for you. It's a large part of it's that realization that just because the girl on the cover of the magazine with ads is smiling.

Doesn't mean she's not hating life in that exact picture. Oh, I love that. Right. And it's that? We're so. Caught up on the health and fitness competition, right? It's like, I am healthier than, Oh, you only don't eat gluten, dude. I, I don't eat gluten and dairy. You're like, well, I don't eat gluten dairy, or meat.

Like I don't eat gluten dairy meat or breathe. Right. Like it's a giant competition, more healthy. And then from a body point of view, right. You're like, wow, that guy is in really good shape. Except for his legs. Right. And like, it's always this giant sort of rip people down competition, and it's, it's this who can be more healthy, I don't think is healthy at all.

So for me, the concept of health attraction is just sort of, if you realize really what we're trying to do here, right? So the absence of pain to feeling good about yourself, improving. You yourself, but realizing that at the end of the day, what's left is still yourself, right? You don't actually get transformed into a different person.

It goes a long way for really changing your mindset about how to eat, how to train what the real goals are, is the goal to figure out how many hours a day you can get away with working out and then how to, what supplements to take to recover properly so that you, again, tomorrow you can train for eight hours or is it trying to figure out wow.

You know, I can get pretty good results out of. You know, an hour and a half total across a week. And that really allows me to spend more time with my kids and my family and my friends. And just more time to be creative in other areas, right. Or the, I can explore different food options and still stay in a healthy body fat level, because I know that it's awesome to have abs when you're flexing, et cetera, but you don't have to be that person who has abs all the time.

That's not actually the, a great marker. Of health, right? 

Jonathan Levi: Well, it's a marker that you're below the body fat that your body, I mean, body fats are great survival technique in your body, but it doesn't look good.

Brad Pilon: It does. But you know, the other thing that's interesting is that you have people who have guys specifically, you know, pretty close to a six-pack at 16% body fat, right?

And then you can have guys who are down in the sixth and seventh and just because they don't have a well-built, developed core, there's still no app development that makes it looks great on Instagram. Right. So I get the app then because they're beautiful. But at the same time, it's too obsessive about whether or not you have them knowing that there's just some people who have them at higher body fats and don't have them lower, et cetera.

You just have to roll with that. Right. And then getting too caught up in why you don't have a vein splitting down your bicep, like Hugh Jackman has. Why don't I like it must be training wrong. I gotta work on this. That sort of is not. Health attraction to me, it's almost health diversion, right? Like if you're so caught up in the game of health, that you sort of forgot what health.

Is or was that sound familiar. Just get that right when you, they kind of look back at it and they go, if I was in this, just because I was competitive, not because I really love powerlifting, et cetera, but I, you know, I've had giant bone chips removed my elbows, I almost at 50 and weighing the pros and cons of what I was doing when I was in my twenties and thirties.

And I'm not knocking powerlifters together. All the power. Do you guys just strong and big, but it's weighing the pros and cons. I would go the same way with marathon runners or competitive, longest and cyclists, right? When you stop at 40 or 50 and you have possibly debilitating injuries from the thing you are trying to do for health sake previously.

It really brings the question, what is health and what are we doing? So it's that sort of the whole thing I'm working on. I love it.

Jonathan Levi: I love it as a methodology. It's the same methodology I applied to work and business, which is, is this much more going to make me this much happier? And it generally, it doesn't exactly.

So choosing happiness and choosing balance. I love that. Brad, let me ask you one more question before we get going. Absolutely. Like I mentioned, we like to give homework I'm evil like that, so I hope you will join me in being a little bit evil and giving our listeners one piece of homework, whether that's trying something out, a written exercise, or even maybe an article that they absolutely have to read.

Brad Pilon: Okay. Well, just stick with the fasting concept, and let's broaden our understanding of what. To just a general philosophy of facet and we're going to kind of high up here. Right. And so you could view meditation as a form of fasting, right? Because you're literally trying for an absence of void. And then obviously there's a fasting involving as little calories as possible.

Whatever is, it's sort of moving towards a period of time of nothing. Right. So. Most people are really cool with the idea of if someone tells them, I just want you to try meditating, just do 20 minutes the morning you tried it, but it's a gap total. But when I say try fasting, people like never going to happen.

So this is what I want you to do if you're a, just a frequent eater and you're always going to be a frequent eater, but you have a desire to lose some weight. I want you to start with just trying to fast in between your meals. Yeah, I know that sounds almost condescending. I don't mean it to be, but if you have prescribed meals, I'd like you to try to not snack in between those meals and just see what it's like.

I want you to pay attention to knowing that you ate two hours ago. And that you're going to eat again in two hours, but I'm making you skip a handful of almonds in between and how that makes you feel and how you actually, you wanted those almonds. You actually feel hungry even though, you know, you're full of nutrients, right?

You're still digesting, but because you didn't get that one little stack, cause I'm a mean, but I want you to be aware of that and you don't ever have to do intimate fasting if you don't want to. But the best lesson to take from that is understanding the difference between hunger. Because, you know, you went to bed early last night, it's been 12 hours and you kind of want some food and desire to eat because you saw a kid walking by with pretzel m&ms and now you really want a pretzel limit.

M's right. Like, so, Oh my God, they make pretzel M and M's the best up there by far my favorite M and M. And I actually have honestly taken with some friends, a game of hungry, hungry hippos, dumped the thing, your frets aluminum's in it and went to town and you will be at. Hungry hippo pro if you play with M and M's.

Oh my, yeah, but don't do that. Well, I'm asking you not to snack between meals. Forget that Eminem. Sorry. My bad. Ignore that last one. Yeah. So just try that at one point when you're just snacking, because you can just try not to and just pay attention to that feeling of. What it's like to not allow yourself to eat when you wanted to.

And you'd see if you can carry that in as a lesson into how you eat. And when you eat, knowing that you know, you can wait, right. You don't need to. Tied yourself over. Right? So a meal will be better and probably tastes better. I feel like I'm just going to wait for, I mean, I'm literally asking you to do what your grandma told you to do and not love it.

Jonathan Levi: Try it out. Love the grandma-related homework at grandma's always. Right. Don't you hate that? We've talked about it on the show before. I was like, why is mom always right. Always running doubly.

Brad Pilon: So exactly because the only one who can not one went up to mum. Right? Does grandma? That is true. 

Jonathan Levi: Mr. Brad Pilon, pilon. I got it right this time. Brad Pilon. Let me ask you if people want to get in touch with you, check out your book, your blog, all your amazing stuff. Where do they do that?

Brad Pilon: All right, so I'm a bit of a narcissist. Everything's my name? Uh, so you can start with Twitter. So it's just at Brad Pilon, random thoughts, that kind of thing.

Get a feel for who I am. If you kind of like the randomness there, you can go to bradpilon.com, which is my blog. And if you'd like that too, then maybe assignments switch on over to eat, stop, eat.com and check out my blatant self-promotion for my book. 

Jonathan Levi: Love it. And we will actually link up to the book to the blog, to everything on our site. We'll put that in the show notes. Brad, it's been a pleasure chatting, although I'm actually starving now. So I think I might go cheat on the homework and eat and then not eat till tomorrow. 

Brad Pilon: Beautiful. I love it. 

Jonathan Levi: Awesome. Brad has been a pleasure chatting. You have a great day.

Brad Pilon:  You too man.

Closing: Thanks for tuning in to the Becoming Superhuman Podcast. For more great skills and strategies, or for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.becomingasuperhuman.com/podcast. We'll see you next time.