by Dave Asprey
Slows aging from oxidative stress
Reduces inflammation—both brain inflammation and love handles
Boosts your emotional state, building self-confidence
Improves your relationship with food
Enhances your ability to enter a spiritual and meditational state
OTHER WAYS OF GOING WITHOUT
I’ve been talking mostly about the effects of fasting from food, but remember that there are many other types of fasting. Maybe you want to cut back on alcohol, for instance. The same principles apply. This is not an all-or-nothing situation, unless you’re an alcoholic—in which case I encourage you to find the support you need to get healthy. Going without alcohol for thirty, sixty, or ninety days is an alcohol fast. You’re not giving it up, you’re just going without for a while. Alcohol fasting provides significant benefits, including a reduction in liver fat, less inflammation, and dramatically better sleep. It helps detoxify the liver and pancreas, strengthens the heart, and sharpens the communication pathways in the brain.17 Although I really want to believe the claims that moderate drinking is harmless and may even have some health benefits, the science just doesn’t support this wishful thinking. Alcohol disrupts certain neural pathways in the brain. It stresses the liver and promotes the production of toxins in the pancreas. It carries lipopolysaccharides into your blood. It increases your risk of several types of cancer, including liver and esophageal cancer. It can lead to heart arrhythmias and cardiomyopathy, a stiffening of the heart muscle. So yes, alcohol fasting is a good thing.
Or maybe you decide you want to fast from tobacco. I don’t have to tell you about the benefits of quitting cigarettes, because they should be obvious even if you’re a smoker. Treating your break from tobacco as a fast can make it easier to break free from it entirely. A central part of fasting is telling your body that there will be brief periods where you don’t get the things you feel you need. With tobacco this is a particular challenge, because it is a highly addictive substance, especially because cigarettes contain nontobacco flavoring agents that dramatically increase addiction. But you know what? Food is addictive, too, yet you can learn to master it. Remember the difference between a craving and a hunger: when your body tells you that you need something like a cigarette, it’s lying to you. Smoking is a powerful craving, but it is a craving all the same. It is something the body wants but not something it needs. And despite all the stories, nicotine withdrawal peaks on the third day after you quit.18 After that, it’s about understanding why you choose to do what you do.
But go in with your eyes open. You are messing with powerful forces inside your body and mind, and they may not give up easily. They certainly did a number on me during my vision quest in the cave. A certain amount of discomfort is normal when you begin to confront those wants. Whether it’s food or alcohol or a cigarette, your body may seem to be screaming at you that it needs the thing you are taking away. Develop the discipline to silence the screams. Don’t assume you can simply think your way through this. You can sail through it with the biohacks that make fasting easier, regardless of what you are fasting from, or you can muscle your way through with willpower alone. Sleep, exercise, breathing, and meditation can all help. You’ll read a lot more about them in the upcoming chapters.
It bears repeating, because it’s such an essential idea, that the key to any successful fast is learning to feel safe when going without. The thing you are going without doesn’t even need to be a substance. It can be a lifestyle or pattern of behavior. Many years ago, I was getting my MBA at Wharton while working full time, and I couldn’t keep up with all the things I was doing. I realized I had to go on a media fast to save my sanity. I switched off the TV and stopped paying my cable bill so that I couldn’t be tempted to turn it back on. I realized that I’d been putting so much time and energy into watching television that it was disrupting my ability to graduate—which I barely did anyway.
Once I got used to not watching TV, I realized how much I hadn’t really wanted to watch it in the first place. Today, more than twenty years later, I’ve kept my TV-free habit. I’ve probably saved a few thousand dollars and definitely saved many thousands of hours of my time, time that I was able to use more productively. Instead of watching TV three or four hours a day, I’ve been reading books, writing, recording almost a thousand podcast episodes, starting companies, and playing with my kids. It all started with a planned two-year TV fast.
I certainly didn’t think of it that way at the time, but I was doing a form of biohacking when I gave up TV. Just as Big Food caters to the dietary cravings in your brain, the entertainment industry has developed techniques to cater to sensory cravings in your brain. The sounds, rhythms, and storytelling techniques are designed to stir up dopamine in your brain. Eating junk food makes you feel safe, by design. Bingeing shows on Netflix or chewing through YouTube videos can also make you feel safe because they let you avoid the stressful thoughts and feelings circling around in your head. No wonder people indulged all of these things like mad during pandemic isolation. A certain amount of indulgence can be harmless, even essential, to staying sane during stressful times. The sense of safety can be an illusion, however. Occasional, helpful indulgences can become self-destructive coping strategies. At the very least, they are almost certainly diverting time and energy from other things that you want to do with your life.
That’s why Cameron Sepah recommends dopamine fasting: to help break you free from those cravings. A dopamine fast helps liberate your brain from its addiction to the emotional jolts of movies and TV shows. When your body expends less energy on metabolizing junk food, it devotes more resources to autophagy and cellular repair. When your mind expends less energy processing junk culture, it devotes more resources to the creativity and original thinking.
That’s why I also recommend that you try intermittent social media fasting. Believe me, I’m not saying social media is a bad thing. It keeps us connected to people we might never talk to otherwise; it has maintained and strengthened a lot of relationships in my life even as it stokes divisions in society and censors useful health information. But I’m going to make a wild guess that you spend more time on social media that you’d like to—and I’d bet I’m right, except that I don’t gamble. Every text message, every Facebook post, every tweet scrolling by is another little dopamine hit in your brain. It’s hard to resist.
The incremental, adaptable style of fasting works here, too. Try not picking up your phone until noon. An intermittent social media fast? You’ll find that it’s an amazing feeling—and much harder to do than you might think. What I did, and what I do to this day, is tie my social media with at least the beginning of my intermittent food fast. I leave my phone in airplane mode overnight, so when I wake up in the morning, I don’t have any Internet content. I don’t see any texts, and I don’t have access to my social media accounts. My rule is that until I drop my kids off at school—or now that home schooling is a thing, until after I sit down with the kids while they eat breakfast—I’m on my intermittent social media fast. Two years ago, I began posting notices on my Instagram account to let my followers know when I’m media fasting. I was pleasantly surprised by how positively people responded. They supported the idea, and they respected my time when I went dark. You don’t have to delete Facebook; just limit the window of time you allow yourself to look at it. You don’t have to give up food, either; just limit when you eat it.
At first it felt odd to fast from social media. I didn’t have any clever biohacks to help me out, no digital equivalent of MCT and fiber. It was more like the shock therapy of going into the cave. But soon I became more aware of my tendency to overuse my phone. Then media fasting started to become natural. Now if I pick up my phone to do work-related social media in the morning, it actually feels weird.
A wonderful paradox of fasting is that it can make you feel calmer. That just sounds wrong, doesn’t it? How can you take away the things that make you feel safe and satisfied yet end u
p feeling safer? The secret is that fasting is a habit changer. You will go without something and realize you didn’t actually need it. The fasting literally changes your body and reprograms your brain. It makes you stronger. It activates your innate energy generation and self-repair mechanisms, in all of their forms. The result is that you feel more self-confident, more self-sufficient, and simply better.
First you have to get started, though, and you’re not going to get very far if your initial impression is that fasting is a difficult, miserable experience. That is why it’s so important to master the art of having a cup of coffee and a little MCT oil or prebiotic fiber for breakfast. By using that hack and many others I’ll tell you about in the coming chapters, you can skip the pain while getting all the benefits of fasting. At the same time that it makes you stronger, fasting opens up your awareness of who is in control of your body: you are! Once you assert more power over the way you eat, it will be much easier to assert similar power over how you use social media or how you confront any of the other unwanted cravings in your life.
Fasting is like a Swiss Army knife, an incredibly impactful tool that has far more use than just weight loss. Through fasting you realize the feeling of self-control, and self-control leads you to make better decisions about the air you breathe, the food you eat, and the content you consume.
Every action has a return on investment for it. In business, they call it ROI, shorthand for whether or not you are applying your resources in a smart way. Fasting has a very high ROI, whereas the return on investment from eating French fries is very low: a brief hit of dopamine from the salty goodness, followed by twenty-four hours of inflammation from the damaging fats. When you think about what fasting does for you on the cellular level and then consider what eating low-quality food does to you in comparison, it’s obvious why this is true. The ROI on a glass of wine is better than the fries, but it is still negative if you look at how it destroys good sleep. Social media helps you stay connected with friends and know what’s going on in the world, but it also allows you to be controlled by your favorite social media algorithm. With every craving, think about whether you’re getting a good ROI. If you’re not, give it up for half a day, and see what happens.
Fasting allows you to think clearly about those choices, because it heightens your awareness. It puts you in control of your biology. It lets you make your own rules, which is a core part of being human. When I say make your own rules, that applies to everything—even to fasting itself. Throughout this book I’ll share some of the fasting methods that have worked best for me, but don’t forget who is really calling the shots: you create your own fast.
It’s your life to do your way. Choose what you would like to do without, and then make it happen.
2
Enlisting Your Molecular Machines
In retrospect, it seemed as though I had prepared all my adult life for a vision quest in a cave. Despite being the son of an engineer, from a family of hard-core scientists, I’d always been a closet seeker, reading spiritual literature and curiously exploring philosophies that weren’t a natural fit for a rationalist like me. At first, my seeking was fueled by a burning desire to understand how people could believe in ideas that, to me, seemed ridiculous or impossible. I took so many religion courses in college that in my senior year, I discovered I was only one class away from accidentally earning a minor in religious studies. In one such seminar a wise professor asked the class what all of the world’s most extreme and violent religious fanatics had in common. In my youthful arrogance, I said, “They’re all irrational.” His reply: “No. They are completely rational. They just have different beliefs and assumptions than you do, and they behave accordingly. Their actions are rational if you believe what they do.”
Those words really set me on a new path, because I thought I was rational, but I had not tested most of my beliefs about the world. I had already learned that my assumptions about what to eat to stay thin were wrong, and I began to wonder whether how many of my other assumptions about the way the world worked were actually true.
In my early thirties I traveled to Tibet to study meditation with the local masters. I witnessed several sadhus, spiritual men who fasted for weeks as part of their ascetic lifestyle and practiced self-denial without dying—or suffering. I realized that my beliefs about what the human body could endure were too limiting. I started to become a guinea-pig kind of guy who would jump into any situation with both feet if I identified it as something that scared me. The more I did this, the more I realized that facing down your fears is liberating. I used to be afraid of heights, so I would go up to the top of tall buildings and lean over the edge until I conquered the fear. It was terrifying—until one day when it wasn’t anymore. Was I fasting from a feeling of comfort at those times? Actually, yes. I didn’t die even though it felt as if I would, and it made me stronger.
All of this is to say that over the years I’ve gotten comfortable with pushing my boundaries, especially when I think that doing so will result in personal growth. It was with all these experiences tucked away inside me that I filled out an online form to set up my vision quest, and then I talked to the shaman, Delilah, on the phone. Her personality definitely seemed a little extreme for my comfort level, and I could feel my skepticism and probably some fear creeping into our dialogue. Perfect! Already pushing my fear buttons. As we spoke, she shared the sorts of stories that sounded like the shamanic experiences I’d read about, experiences that were truly transformative. So I figured: this is a person who walks the walk. We agreed to work together, we set a date for my challenge, and I flew out to Arizona.
Delilah’s ranch was located near Sedona, in the middle of a national forest. Sedona has some of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth. The soil there is a saturated red—in this case, the postcards don’t lie—and everywhere you look you see strange spires and cliffs cut into the soft rock by ancient rivers and winds. Seen through the eyes of a desert native, the land was teeming with life among the sparse scrub. All around me I noticed spiny cactuses, venomous rattlesnakes, and lots of tiny birds, each uniquely adapted to the striking but harsh environment. The sky there is a different kind of blue, and the sunsets are a color that hasn’t yet been named, not even in the extra-large box of crayons you coveted as a child.
When I showed up at Delilah’s house, she fed me watermelon juice, which, it turns out, can stabilize blood glucose levels even though it has a high glycemic index, making it a useful way to initiate a fast. She reminded me that I was about to be dropped into the wilderness in the morning—as if I needed a reminder. One of the central goals of my vision quest was to endure intense solitude. In the back of my mind, I knew I was afraid of being alone. I was afraid of being hungry. I was afraid of not having something to eat when I felt lonely. It was time to bring all of these fears to the surface so I could face them head-on.
But even as I arrived for my solitary vision quest, the shaman greeted another seeker who showed up for the same spiritual journey. I was so pissed that I almost went home. You know that feeling when something you desperately wanted suddenly seems impossibly out of reach? Whether it was fear or true outrage talking, I still don’t know. I just know that in the moment, it seemed as though my vision quest was being compromised and would never lead to the sense of freedom and restoration I’d been seeking.
I could not have been more wrong.
YOUR ESCAPE FROM INFLAMMATION
A great benefit of the going without aspect of all types of fasting is that it gives your body a chance to rest and do a thorough cleanup at the cellular level. Biological mechanisms that are typically occupied with digestion (including the digestion of things you would have been better off not eating in the first place) switch into self-care mode. Dead cells and tissue, fatty deposits, tumors, and other obstructions to optimal bodily function are all burned as fuel or bundled up and eliminated as waste.
A great benefit of all that cleanup, meanwhile, is that it soothes one of the most in
sidious and destructive processes in your body: inflammation.
Everyone has experienced inflammation, but scientists are still puzzling out exactly how it works at the cellular level. Fundamentally, inflammation is a by-product of the immune system activating itself in response to an injury or perceived threat. If you twist your ankle, for example, it turns red and becomes swollen and hot to the touch as a result of an inflammatory response intended to begin the repair and healing processes. What’s happening is that your body is enlarging the tissues around the damaged area and flooding it with immune cells and proteins designed to fight disease, promote clotting, and knit together damaged tissue. That package of responses is known as acute inflammation, and it is the good kind.
Acute inflammation comes to the rescue quickly to destroy invading microbes, remove dead cells, and repair cellular damage. It lasts just hours or days before returning the body to a state of balance. In the first century CE, the Roman physician Aulus Celsus wrote one of the first medical encyclopedias, De Medicina,1 in which he defined acute inflammation by its telltale symptoms: dolor, rubor, functio, laesa, tumor, and calor. In modern terminology, that corresponds to pain, redness, immobility, swelling, and heat, or PRISH, which is a shorthand still used to train physicians and which perfectly describes the symptoms of a sprained ankle. We would not survive long without acute inflammation; it heals wounds, builds muscle, and fights off infection.
But there is another, more disconcerting type of inflammation—the kind that can be triggered by the things we eat. Along with the essential energy needed to run our muscles and brain, many foods contain damaging molecules that stress your cells in ways similar to a physical injury, which is why they provoke a similar inflammatory response. In this case, however, there is no specific injury to heal, and the inflammation lasts as long as those damaging molecules are around. If you don’t change your diet, they can stay with you for months, years, or your whole lifetime. The result is chronic inflammation. It is your body’s self-repair system gone haywire.