5:2 Fasting

Do you need help losing weight, reversing diabetes, or managing other conditions like PCOS? I can help you. Stay tuned for my series of videos on fasting diets, fasting mimicking, intermittent fasting, and the benefits of fasting for health. This video covers the 5:2 fasting method.

Welcome back everybody! Dr. Derek here, and this is our next video in our fasting series today we're gonna talk about 5 - fasting you may not know what that means I'll explain it with videos for so 5 - fasting is spending 5 days of the week eating food and 2 days of the week fasting so let's dive a little bit deeper into the different kind of combinations and permutations that that can look like for the most part we want people to be sticking to their normal low carbohydrate diet with intermittent fasting during this period of time so that means during those 5 days they are still narrowing their window eating usually - about 8 hours and during the time they're eating they're also eating a low carbohydrate diet watch the previous videos on low carb or carbohydrate diets for a successful fast and implementing intermittent fasting so to go deeper into 5 - what this generally means is those 5 days we're eating as we want to okay and then we choose two days of the week to do fast meaning after dinner on that last day the next full day we don't eat and then the next day after that we'll have our kind of first meal after in our intermittent fasting timing window so there's a few ways to do this this can be straight no calorie day meaning we kind of emphasize simply herbal teas water maybe some bone broth if we need to yes I realize there's a small amount of calories in the broth relax it can also be a calorie restricted day because a lot of times when we're doing a 5 - we're doing this every single week so it's not just a oh I'm going to do a 5 - once a quarter I mean it's certainly better than not doing it but this is a strategy in which will often have a week the routine set up and so with that if we're going to be doing us routinely sometimes we don't necessarily need to do a zero calorie day but actually just a calorie restricted day still following the local carbohydrate diets 500 calories is generally where we'll set the bar for folks doing a 5 too fast routinely the next question is well do we spread those two days out or do we put them back-to-back balls kind of in your court obviously if we put them back-to-back that's going to be a more intense fast if we spread them out it's going to be less intense is one gonna be more beneficial the dad is probably not there to support one way or the other though we do know that generally the longer we do these fasts the more kind of metabolic physiological impact they have so we can probably be sure that if we put those two days back-to-back we're going to have a stronger fast so if we're entertaining putting those two fasts back-to-back this is also where a calorie restriction instead of a kind of zero calorie fats can be more helpful if we're gonna go say take Saturday and Sunday and we're not gonna you know eat normally over the weekend simply cutting down those calories to 500 can make this a little bit more of a sustainable entry point into doing a 5-2 if we're going to say split those two days up maybe we have enough you know experience of fasting in our belt that we can go through those two 24 hour periods and it's not a problem at all so those tend to be the combinations I'll recommend for certain patients when we're talking about 5:2 fasting I found that the back-to-back situation with the calorie restriction is more doable certainly for a lot of folks than zero calories but certainly we're going to get a more powerful treatment if we keep the caloric content to zero or pretty darn close to zero suggestions apply as we talked about with the 24-hour fast this is where it's helpful to have herbal teas around helpful to have bone broth around making sure we're staying hydrated to try to reduce some of those hunger pangs and we can even dive into using ketones as a potential supplement to help with energy or what if we're feeling a little faint that's not an unreasonable supplement to add in during this time when we're starting to extend fast past that 24 hour period some people will get things like muscle cramps magnesium could be helpful for that some salt can be helpful in that respect as well and so certain people will need a little bit of extra support to do that more comfortably this is why we always kind of recommend being overseen by a doc if we're going to be doing any fasting simply because there are certain individual challenges that can come up during that time and this is why I work with my patients pretty closely when they're gonna be doing some fasting so that we can make sure these things go as smooth as possible remember the whole reason we're talking about fasting is because we want to make this something that's sustainable for you that it's not oh you know I did a fast this year and you never do one again but it's that something that's in your toolbox is a tool that you can lean on to you know help you know restore regular physiology in your body to help you know lose weight to help feel more energized and to start to make sure our metabolism is running optimally and fasting the evaluable tool in that so to do a quick recap of our video series so far we started with talking about why should we fast who should fast what benefits can it have what do we need to be cognizant of but for doing one we jumped into low carbohydrate diets it's a great way to prep for a successful fast and then we talked about implementing intermittent fasting and time restricted eating as kind of dipping our toe in the shallow end our last video was about 24-hour fasts and how to do those throughout the week and today we talked a little bit about five to fasting and kind of implementing a couple of fasting days a week to more aggressively achieve our goals in our next video we're gonna talk about five day fasting mimicking diet and this is called prolong this is something that I've spoken about before and I find it a helpful tool at allowing people to safely comfortably jump into a fast it's got a lot of research behind it it's got great outcomes and I'll talk about what I love about it talk about what I don't like so much about it but you know I look forward to sharing that with you in our next video if you have any questions about five to fasting if you've done it yourself and you want to leave us some comments please do I'm always looking for feedback to understand you know where people's heads are at what they're interested in hearing and sharing your experience so another great place that we would love to hear comments is on our Facebook page we actually have a specific group for our patients who do fasting if you go to our doc Derick website sorry our doc their Facebook page and search for the group revive your health if you were into fasting I want to learn more or want to get some first-hand experience from some of the people have already done it during that group we'd have to be happy to have you there's some wonderful resources on there there's some videos on there and you know it's a place where we can just get together to all you know support ourself on this journey so I look forward to having either so stay tuned for our next video and we're gonna talk about the five day fasting and making diet cold for long.