Episode 447: Dr. Pete Patitsas

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Welcome to intermittent fasting stories. I'm your host, Jen Stevens, author of the New York Times bestseller, Fast Feast Repeat, as well as the book that started it all, Delay Don't Deny. I lost over 80 pounds thanks to intermittent fasting after learning how to delay my eating rather than denying myself the delicious foods I want to eat.

now. Who's ready to hear an inspirational, intermittent fasting story? That's why we're here. So let's get excited to talk to today's guest.

Hi everybody and welcome to episode 447 of Intermittent Fasting Stories. Today I'm here with Dr. Pete Patitsis. Pete lives in Central Pennsylvania where he is an emergency room medicine doctor and author of the Author's Diet. Welcome, Pete. Hey, thanks, Jen. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here for 447? 447. That's like blows my mind that I've talked to 447.

I love to talk to everyone that I interview on this show, but I especially love when it is someone from the medical field and especially a doctor. And especially when it's a doctor who has written a book that incorporates intermittent fasting and believes it's a healthy way for everyone to live. So my audience knows I like to start by asking, I'm going to ask you the same thing. What brought you to intermittent fasting and when was that?

Yeah, no, great question. Thanks, Jim, for having me. Real excited to be here. I'm a medical doctor and I'm also a Greek American. So I qualify for citizenship. I want to serve in the army. So I'm going to wait until I'm 43. So I got three years to go before getting my citizenship. But essentially, I bring that up to say because Greeks and people of Greece usually are Greek Orthodox, Greek Orthodox Christians.

It's an ancient church. It's an ancient religion. It has a lot of mysticism to it. It's sort of an Eastern variety of Christianity. And with that said, though, I have been doing some form of fasting since I was seven. Yeah. And I actually have been to a Greek Orthodox wedding. It was very different. They're long. I was like, this is the most interesting wedding I've ever been to in my life.

There's a lot of ritual. There's a very sensual religion in the sense that there's a lot of incense and candles and art. It's very body and soul oriented. And that's going to become relevant as we explore fasting off of style because it's from that tradition that the ancient church believed that we could reach the soul through the senses.

an accident that the church would recommend to practice such as fasting in order to heighten a person's spiritual state and progression.

Wait a minute, are you telling me it's not a fad that we just invented in the past five years? Right. They're all a long time. I know. And you know, certainly is the nearly universal practice in many places. And I think there's a number of reasons for that. One is that when you are limited by technology, you need the most return on investment of some practice. And what it turns out is that intermittent fasting is that ultimate return on investment that makes all mammals survive evidently 30 to 40% longer than their cohort.

When they're consuming calories in this pattern, I know you know a lot about that. But it's interesting to me that if you don't have modern hospitals, medications, drugs, et cetera, like what can we do? And one way or another, man determined that intermittent fasting might be something worth pursuing. Now, the way I arrived intermittent fasting, like I said, is it since seven, I've been doing that practice.

The Orthodox Church basically has a few parameters. So about half the year or more, it's actually over half the year. It's almost two thirds of the year, depending on the year. We basically go vegan. And what I mean by that is, in the Orthodox Church, you can't take communion later on in the afternoon or early afternoon late morning unless you fasted from everything. You can't have, actually you can't even have water.

But for that practice in the morning, no food whatsoever until you have communion. Very interesting. And as I pursued that as a child, what you can imagine is kind of like a strange thing. You know, people used to, I remember there was a friend of mine actually put milk in like a cup or something and then like rinsed it and it was like,

called Peter's milk in there, you know, you broke your fast, I'm like, oh my God, the molecules. The point is that it really was a funny sort of branding of me and my family, because it was just so different. I mean, again, when you imagine that the normal Westerner is eating all day long,

all the food types that they want to as much as they want and like i said all day long in fact i i learned not too long ago that the average american eats across fifteen hours and there's eleven eating events over that fifteen hour period wow the idea of the limit and again i think a lot of this is not even conscious it's just kind of grazing and we grab something and go it's very

We're not aware of it, which of course, you know, there's a lot of traditions that say awareness is the first step to everything. But it's very cultural. Point is, is that when I'm telling people, hey, I'm sorry, I can't have pizza on Wednesday because I'm fasting today, despite your birthday or Friday for cupcakes. We're never talking about my childhood now. There was some discipline that went into that of sort of self denial, delay gratification, et cetera.

But at the same time, the way that the Athos diet was written was that it wanted to optimize that Orthodox Christian practice of fasting so we get the most health benefit. There's about 300 million of us throughout the world. And most of us are encouraged to fast, like I said, for half to two thirds of the year. And we basically pursue a vegan diet. The problem was, as a seven-year-old who's trying to just pursue the parameters of the most generic sense,

To me, that man, I could eat all the white bread I want. I could eat all day as much as I wanted. And I was a pretty husky kid. I mean, a lot of people would be like, oh, yeah, Pete, you know, you're your vegan, you're fasting. You should be losing weight, you know, during lens and during these various weeks of fasting you're doing. But the reality was I wasn't at all.

vegan food is not always healthy food. I think what? Girl Scouts and men's are vegan. No, you're right. And as far as you say that, because like Oreos was like a huge thing. Oh my God, there's nothing. You're vegan. What a disaster. Yeah. Right. So as I went from, let's just say,

obedient child trying to just live this out for the sake of the discipline and that benefit. When you enter medical school and you're asked to do a project on something related to health, which I did, in 2016, 2017, that winter, I had like six weeks to do some private study, like an independent study.

I just wanted to review the benefits of fasting in this way to maybe even more universally throughout the world in a scientific lens. And as I researched the best practices of fasting throughout the Orthodox world, I realized that there was an area in particular in Greece. It's a peninsula in Greece called Athos.

And it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's a beautiful place. It's a magical place. It truly is. I've been there. Essentially, there are monks that have been living there for the last 1200 years or more, and they're outliving all societies at all times, regardless of technology that's circulating around them. They don't have access to it. Yeah. What is going on? And of course, they're practicing the Orthodox style of fasting, which is basically vegan.

And there's certain parts of the year where they can also have milk and eggs and things of that sort. But no, they never eat meat. But regardless, they're out living even Greeks that are doing the fast. And what I started to look at was not just what they were eating or how they were eating or how much they were eating, but when they were eating. And there is a monk named Father Nicodemos. Okay, they always have these beautiful names.

Father and he called them us in the 1700s was referencing it writing this all down was referencing Practices at Athos that were occurring and in the Orthodox Church even a thousand years earlier I'm talking like early Christianity like ancient stuff where they would only eat for a confined period of the day and With that said if you can imagine if the mandate is to fast

To get to communion and to do that every day because you never know when life was over. You are essentially intermittent fast because you're not eating anything from the prior evening until that late morning early afternoon. And then at the monastery in particular, they don't just then graze the rest of the day. They oftentimes will just have one meal. Right. And so lo and behold,

When they're saying, hey, let's fast with Jesus to the ninth hour or let's prepare for communion. Cause tomorrow we might die when you prepare our soul. They are intermittent fasting to like the maximum. I love that that was just how they lived and even better that they were so, you know, living so much longer and healthier, I would guess. Well, exactly. Like neurodegenerative disorders, diabetes, cholesterol issues, hypertension, they don't exist in this peninsula.

And their genes are just as European as the rest of ours. So what's going on? And as I say, from those first principles of preparing for your end, keeping sober, struggling with Jesus, et cetera, suddenly now they're living 30% longer than the average individual. I mean, some of them are living into their 90s, early hundreds, very cognitively alert, functional,

And it makes sense. So as I started to look at this from a scientific lens, the literature, the studies, the reviews, the anecdotal stories, you start recognizing like, these guys are tapping into intermittent fasting. And they're getting all the physiological benefit of sirtuins being upgraded, brain-derived neuropathic factor, growth hormone release, testosterone changes. I mean, all of this stuff is coming with that. And so it's just the strange irony that in the mandate of this tradition,

Great. And again, their first goal is not to live forever. But ironically, that's what's happening relative to those around them. I basically pulled together the best practices of Orthodox fasting where people were living the longest so that you're not just getting some type of disciplinary psychological benefit, which is important. And there's a spiritual benefit, et cetera. But you're getting a health benefit too. What I did is in 2017 in preparation for Lent, because it's basically a 48 day fast for us, I did it like par excellence.

And by the way, I just want to pull this in for everybody who's listening. It's not a 48 day fast where you're not eating for 48 days. I wanted people to, they're like, oh, 48 days, I've got a fast for 48 days. Jesus only had to fast for 40. I'm out, but it's not, it's not a full 48 day fast. So I wanted to pull that in there. Right. And if the three pillars basically of this 48 day program is essentially intermittent fasting, where I recommend people eat only between four and eight hours a day.

We're saying no calories outside of that, no artificial sweeteners, nothing of that sort. And then what they're also doing is pursuing a vegan diet to get their protein. So it's plant-based, but you can do shrimp as well. We're really upping the protein. We're really upping the fat. We actually have a carb maximum that people are supposed to pursue. Again, this is for 48 days. It's rigorous, but it's effective. And then finally, because everyone's always wondering about exercise, walking is all that we recommend, 30 minutes of that.

Between those three pillars over 48 days, which is a really intense form of fasting, people lose 10% of their body weight. They have increased energy. A lot of their chronic inflammatory states are decreased. And there's a lot of studies to show that over those 48 days, they are truly healthier at the end.

various markers for inflammation and stress are decreased as a result of doing this. And just to add one more thing to say is that I always find it so interesting in the 21st century, we all take our health for granted. We all take for granted that we will even be there for the celebration. I don't know if you ever worked the holiday, but I'm an ER doc and I work holidays and I can't tell you how much tragedy there is

the day before the day, the day of Christmas or whatever, name your holiday, things happen. And the day after, that's a very confusing experience. Merry Christmas. I'm like, grandma died, what should I be sad? But the reason I bring this up is if every individual took it seriously, they would literally have less risk of dying on Christmas, on dying on Easter, on having tragedy mingled with the feasting.

I think it's no accident. And I think it's something that we need to keep in mind as we live very comfortable lives in America. We compartmentalize suffering and disease in many ways. That's a very civilized, wonderful thing. But the raw reality is you might not be there for your next holiday or your next reunion. And so is this something even in a short term? I'm not even talking about 20 years of intermittent fasting. I'm talking about just 48 days of it. Could you turn back the clock? And I think the answer clearly is yes.

Yeah, I think that's so important to talk about. Really, we want to be there for decades with our families and for all of those celebrations. I've talked about it on the show before, watching my dad through the last months of his life, and he very much suffered from a wide variety of lifestyle diseases.

And couldn't do intermittent fasting. It didn't want to, right? And didn't want to make changes to what he was eating. And unfortunately, he grew up eating the standard American diet and believed that medicine had a pill for him. And that was just the way that is what he believed. You go to the doctor, you get a prescription. That is what you do. And then you live your life the way you want to.

And just understanding that we can do something different. We can make changes to our lifestyle incorporating the intermittent fasting, focusing on what we eat. I want to dig into those three pillars. You know, I'm completely on board with the four to eight hour window literally every day for the rest of your life.

Yeah. Except for special occasions, right? But even so, you know, I look back on my last Christmas day where I felt like I feasted forever and ever. And then I looked back on how long my window was actually open on Christmas day and it was like eight hours. It felt like forever. Yeah. I know. Like five, eight hours felt like forever. Yeah. But it's something we can definitely do. I see that you have one of your pillars. Those, of course, walking, we need to move our bodies. That's super important.

You've got the vegan part in there, vegan plus the shrimp for the protein. And you also mentioned that the Greek Orthodox Church, your vegan for half of the year, is it kind of a seasonal kind of eating? That's what I wanted to dig into a little bit, because I'm fascinated by that.

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Yeah, it's a fasting schedule with very dynamic changes that kind of build up to these holidays, but it's always every Wednesday and Friday, all year long. And then it can be seven weeks before Easter. It can be, I think it's six weeks before Christmas. There's a five week fast in the summer followed by another two week fast. So you add these all up ends up being half to the third of the year. Now, again,

I think what happens is as you break your paradigm with the 48 days, you're like, I could do this every day for the rest of my life. I don't recommend though that people stay vegan for the rest of their life. Okay. I wanted to dig into that a little bit because people are listening to the podcast. They might be new. They're like, wait, I didn't know I had to be vegan to do an intermittent fast. I wanted to dig into that.

You don't, but there are, I do believe that there are benefits to seasonality of dietary changes. And, you know, what is particularly difficult to break down and process and then it comes with inflammation, but maybe makes you stronger. I'm talking about meat right now. Right. You know, that might be great, but maybe it was a while you need to kind of detox and I give your body a break. We are omnivores.

We're supposed to eat everything. It makes us flexible. It makes us very robust. And so in that regard, I'm sort of piggybacking on what is 2000 years of Christian tradition that I'm trying to optimize. And I think is more powerful than any Western medicine we have. I mean, just give you a sense. I never heard of this term. We were talking about statistics earlier. One of these key statistics in medicine is the number needed to treat.

I'll give you an example of how crazy Western medicine is. So, COVID pandemic came and Pfizer comes out with a drug called PaxilVid and it prescribes this to every individual in a certain time window of getting COVID symptoms and it makes you feel better, faster. Okay, sure.

So it turns out that not only did Pfizer make $20 billion in 23 with that drug, but the number needed to treat. In other words, to have one person benefit, how many do we need to give that medication to to keep them out of the hospital, the particular measurement? It was 125.

So I had to give 125 patients packs of it, which was, I think, 500 to $1,000 a day of treatment. I think it was a five-day program. I need to give each one of those people that program in order to get one person from being admitted to the hospital. That sounds really bad. Yeah.

And I imagine it comes with side effects also comes with a massive cost. And also just it's, you know, it's just, I think it's not something you want to hang your hat on in terms of how you're going to get better. What might make you better though and probably will come with great physiological benefit and make you the best you can possible be is a lot of preventative medicine, things like intermittent fasting, various food groups that you can consume on a more regular basis. But like my point is that

While we're all obsessed with technology and the coolest medicines and these cool names that they market that sound expensive. I mean that the success rate that the number need to treat is so poor yet we're all pouring billions of dollars into it. And I think that's just tremendously.

discouraging to hear, but wow, is there something in nature in our own way of living that can prevent us from getting the poor outcomes of COVID? And certainly, if you had respiratory disease, if you were morbidly obese, if you had neurodegenerative diseases, if you had high cholesterol, hypertension, congestive heart failure, COVID might cause quite a havoc on your system. But if I can give you treatments to prevent you from even having those diseases, bring on the COVID. I'll eat it for breakfast. No big deal.

Well, it's a matter of setting yourself up to have a powerful immune system. Right. And we talked before we started recording. I've had a little respiratory something. We're recording this in October. I never get sick very rarely. Whenever something does hit though, first of all, I'm offended. I'm like, what just happened? How did my body catch something? But the thing is, is that my body takes care of it very quickly.

I have a robust immune system. I fast every day. I nourish my body well. I eat lots of plant foods. I'm definitely not a vegan, but I care about what I put into my body. I sleep well. I get sunshine. I move my body and contrast that with the me that was obese.

Yeah, I was 210 pounds. I was a school teacher. I caught a lot of things and it always settled in as an infection. Maybe it was an ear infection. Maybe it was a sinus infection. Maybe my chest became infected, but every illness resulted in I had to go to the doctor eventually and get some sort of antibiotic. But ever since I've been an intermittent faster,

My body has fought off everything with zero antibiotics needed in, I mean, gosh, I guess I haven't needed an antibiotic in nine years now. And so even though I've got a little lingering tickling that my body is clearing up,

I have no doubt my body's going to fight it off like it's meant to do. We are built with a very powerful immune system if we are doing the things that support that. And again, food is medicine. And you know that. And that's one of my favorite phrases, food is medicine. Can you talk about that just a little bit?

Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, first of all, it's an ancient phrase. I think ancient Greek Dakota to have said that, but it makes total sense. I mean, it is the building blocks of our body. The enteric nervous system that lines the gut is so complex, it is second in terms of complexity to the brain itself. And it's actually larger in terms of neurons than your spinal cord.

And there is so much processing that goes on. I mean, people talk about something as mundane as peristalsis, like having bowel movements. I mean, that's a very complex order of events. If there's a reason why when you eat, you don't instantly go to the bathroom. You know, like there's a lot of coordination in that 30 feet of gut.

in order to properly digest, break down, reabsorb water, keep electrolytes in order, et cetera, et cetera. And so that all is managed by a nervous system and you can see how if you hack that nervous system through what you eat and when you eat,

You can turn on all sorts of processes in your body. That entire nervous system, when you're in a fasted state, turns on this sympathetic side, which is flight and fight. And so you will have more energy literally by definition in terms of all the catacolamine released serotonin dopamine. It's released as a result of being in a fasted state. And which is so funny. It's like the exact opposite is what let's say modern man recommends, which is like eat and graze all day.

Right. You said, what was it that like blew my mind that the average person eats over a 15 hour period and has 11 eating events. And I'm like thinking back to myself before intermittent fasting. That's probably true, except I might have been for 16 hours. I don't know. But.

Right, and you know, again, I do think that if you constantly feed yourself, maybe you will have more energy, okay? But it comes at a cost of like obesity, diabetes, bowel problems, et cetera. Well, I did not have more energy, Pete. Well, yeah, you don't. It was, you're on that blood sugar roller coaster where you're like constantly crashing and then trying to get up on the next wave with my little latte or whatever it was in my 100 calorie snack pack. And so you're up and down all the time, but you're right.

We have been told that, well, the food is what gives you energy. Well, look at your body. You've got a lot of stuff stored on there already. Let's use that energy instead. Talk about food is medicine now. I find it fascinating. A quarter of all women in America have an anxiety or depression or depression.

Think about these medications, SSRIs, which increase serotonin release, benzodiazepines, which increase GABA, which kind of cools you off. Interesting, the intermittent fasting, there's two inputs. One input is you get serotonin release that's sustained by being in a fasted state with the sympathetic nervous system.

You know, check that off. We don't need the SSRI anymore, in theory. And then second is ketones act like GABA, the intervigata receptors. So if you have an anxiety problem, ketones themselves will literally cool off the brain. And so when you're eating all day long and you're not having access to ketone, well, now I need a benzodiazepine, which is addictive and you can go through withdrawal and you can have tremors and all sorts of rebound anxiety, et cetera, and addiction problems for that matter.

Meanwhile, we just needed to like harness in our routine a little bit better as to when we eat. Think about all the benefit. I mean, you were mentioning how, you know, you had lost this weight and you haven't been on antibiotic. I mean, just imagine if we took that at scale to all of society. Yeah, we're

suddenly, you know, everyone's sleeping well. No one needs an antibiotic. It's rare. We don't have shortages of beds and staff and nurses and medications, which we do right now, believe it or not, in our healthcare system, which is totally broken. We can't keep up with it. And if we as a population don't do something soon where 100 million people have either diabetes or prediabetes, all of these various diseases, I think 80% of them are entirely preventable. We will bankrupt our healthcare system and America.

And it's just inevitable. I really see it as I look to even young people in the ER, the number of people who really are doing poorly with upper respiratory infections that have prediabetes already in their teenage years, high cholesterol as a 10 year old. There is no system. There is no amount of resources in the world that's going to allow 330 million people in America to just be endlessly medicated and endlessly seen in every ER. And it's not sustainable.

Well I absolutely know what you're talking about and it makes me think back again to when my father was in the hospital and I had those thoughts. He required care to get to the bathroom and he had like two people to get him there every time and they were very short staffed and I had not been in a hospital setting for as long and I was just

you know, someone coming in off the street, I was like, this is not going to be sustainable as, you know, my generation is less healthy than my parents' generation. And when I look around at the people I graduated from high school with, the health problems that they're having at earlier ages than our parents' generation. And you're exactly right. And to think that we can do something about this with our lifestyle, with fasting, it is free.

Yes. With choosing foods that nourish our bodies well with giving us that rest, the digestive rest. And I really wanted to pop back to what you talked about before with mood. You said that a quarter of women are on something for anxiety and depression, which is of course tangent here. So much of that could be prevented with getting our hormones balanced as we get older. You know, we go in after menopause and they're like, here's some drugs for you. And really, we just need hormone replacement.

therapy. But we hear from so many women and men that are long-term intermittent fasteners that their mood has just improved tremendously. And I loved having you explain why that is, and it has to do with the serotonin and the GABA release, the ketones, those things that our bodies make naturally.

It's so funny, like in the course of understanding all of this, you have data, you have knowledge, you have wisdom. Right. And for most of the human society, civilization, et cetera, all we had was wisdom. We couldn't bring the microscope. We couldn't bring the test. We couldn't do the control double blind study, et cetera.

And instead, we had to deal with a different currency, a different method of communication in the form of wisdom over time. What I find, which is just really cool and fascinating, talking about, again, how did I come at intermittent fasting? You had these traditions that have sustained a culture and society for a very long time.

If they last, just like evolution, things that are good last, at least in theory, what is behind all of that to make that work? It starts with the first principle, which is something like, hey, you're going to start fasting at a young age, so you have the discipline and the self denial and the delay gratification and quality over quantity. With that mindset,

and not to get too religious, but it's just like God engineers into the world a mechanism to make health virtuous and virtue healthy. I think from that standpoint, which is why people should do intermittent fasting all the time, I always find it fascinating. The same pathways for addiction are the same ones innervated for food intake, like they're very similar.

They're literally the same highways, the same fibers. And so if you can remain in control, have dominion of yourself, are you also then sidestepping a lifetime of potential addiction? One of the coolest things I ever came across was the case I had in the ER.

This lady was dying of liver failure in her mid 40s. It was very clear to me that she was not going to survive this admission. She had had many for liver failure and encephalopathy, et cetera. But I asked the family because she couldn't provide any history. What's going on here? How long she'd been drinking alcohol just to do a thorough history? And she was like, oh, she started just like five years ago.

I'm like, oh, that's really strange, you know, because usually addiction, alcoholism, these types of diseases, pathologies, they start in your early twenties. Like the theory is if you can get a person beyond these formative years, they are less likely to develop addictive patterns of behavior later on in life. So it's very strange that at 3940, this person suddenly starts drinking alcohol to the extent that they're abusing it. What happened? Well, this is what happened.

She was morbidly obese. She got gastric bypass. I knew that's where you were going with that. I've heard that story before, keep going. Yes, and she has gastric bypass loses all this weight, but the addictive mentality is still there. And so she had to take up something else to fill the gap. I'll tell you, no lie, and it's funny you just mentioned you're connecting with this, because I told this story to some nurses about a month ago in my ER, and they were like, Pete,

My uncles went through the exact same thing. They lost all this way. They all took up drinking. They're all alcoholics now. People who come to the intermittent fasting community come because they've tried so many things the same with my story. I tried literally everything for a long, long time. And finally, my solution was intermittent fasting. But, you know, I got to 210 pounds. I was obese, but I was not yet at the level where we're going to have gastric bypass surgery.

Although probably in the back of my head, I was like, if only I was big enough for gastric bypass, you know, it felt like the easy thing to do. But obviously it's not the easy thing to do. But you know, you're just programmed looking for this answer. And is that going to be the answer? But we have a lot of people who come to our community who have been down that road, who've tried for a long time and who have had gastric bypass surgery. And then now they've lost the weight, but then they were regaining it. So now they're trying fasting, but it's very common to see that alcohol becomes a struggle.

Just because like you said, you can no longer put in the amounts of food that soothed you before. And so you're turning to something else and alcohol just slides right in. Exactly. And it literally is absorbed. It's just funny, again, how we try to sidestep. I keep saying this, but you can game the system, but you can never win the game.

I just feel like in many ways, we see examples of that around us. And it's something we have to keep in mind. And it's something that we have to understand that, again, if you take a pill, obviously, sometimes you just need help. We need to get a person to boost some support so that they can then take on and have a fresh chance to heal themselves naturally. Some people need gastric bypass. It's lesser of all evils. If you're 600 pounds and you're 38 and you're in congestive heart failure, it's time to do something really radical to give you a chance.

But at the same time, once you're through that very urgent, fiery stage, what is a more long-term approach for good health? And you need things like intermittent fasting to get you there. But again, it's so funny to me that even as knowledge, like I said, this wisdom thing, oh my gosh, I recognize that this person lives 30, 40% longer. It seems great, great grandkids. What's that all about? Well, just like anything, we're inquisitive. We look at these anecdotal stories. We try to peel back the curtain as to how this is all working. And then we mechanically figure it out. I think what I worry

is that in Western medicine, again, as soon as we find out that ketones are beneficial, there's like a ketone supplement.

Oh, yeah, I know. That's so funny. Thank goodness those have like come out of favor. I guess people are no longer asking me every day. Does this break the fast? I'm like, you do not want to have ketones. You want to make ketones. It's not the same thing. I had an analogy that I would use back in the day and I'd be like, it's kind of like someone handed you a bottle of sweat and you sprayed it on yourself and thought you exercised spraying yourself with sweat does not give you the benefit of exercising.

And even if it gave you some small marginal benefit, it's like you're missing the universe of benefit. We haven't even talked about growth hormone release. Oh, let's talk about it. There's all of that stuff that comes of the territory. And again, all of those mechanisms then translate into human experience, which is grandma has lived forever. You know, this monastic has lived forever. They're never sick. I've never seen them get sick to go to the hospital. I think sometimes we're just a little bit too

like digitized and focused on like reducing things into their compartments, which can get you so far. But sometimes you have to just kind of lean on our ancient selves to understand what's working, what's not. So growth hormone release, I mean, it's a miracle drug talking about hormone supplementation as people go through menopause or andropause. I've heard that term for men. It's interesting to me, you know, you can have the healthiest body in the world. And no matter what, no smoking, no drinking, no nothing at 30. Every man's losing one to 2% of his testosterone until he dies.

Am I friends? And I call that manopause. Manopause. We've all got husbands that are going through that. And, you know, in 2024, is there something we can do to supplement one of the sort of the cousins of testosterone is growth hormone or cousins of estrogens, estradiolis growth hormone. Some celebrities supplement with it. It sort of increases bone density. It allows for higher percentages of lean muscle mass. Collagen improves all over the body in terms of skin. Growth hormone has some very interesting effects on the immune system.

Well, intermittent fasting, on the low end, increases it by like 200%. Some say you show 1,500% increase depending on how long you go in a fasted state. If you're getting a pulse of growth hormone every day, again, why is this person living 30 to 40% longer? Well, they actually have the hormone profile of a very young person.

And so of course, they're naturally going to look younger, be more functional, be more beautiful. I think beauty is probably a proxy wisdom word for this person's healthy. And so they live a long lives and it all kind of makes sense. But Andre the Giant in the 1980s was a guy with a growth hormone pituitary tumor.

He had a tumor in there that could not remove without killing him. And so he just grew and grew and he was a giant. He had a disease called gigantism. Actually, I've met a few patients in the ER who had gigantism. And it's funny. I met this one guy. He was there for like a respiratory disease. I think we're trying to rule out a blood clot, something like that. But I just asked him, I'm like, sir, tell me about your health history as a child. Like anything abnormal, he kind of paused. He's like, well, I did have a tumor once. I'm like, no, what type of a tumor?

It was a growth hormone tumor. This guy had a jaw of iron. I had never seen anything like it. He was he was a superhuman. The point is, is that we can get growth home and release through three mechanisms, sleep, interesting that people fill out and when they don't sleep through exercise, you're a third of the person if you're not exercising regularly. And finally, through intermittent fasting. So if you just

tally this all up consistently over a lifetime. How much growth hormone will you have versus the average individual? It's no coincidence that hormone is so heavily secreted during fasting. It preserves muscle and it helps in a very different benefits, but it makes you young. And as a result, you live longer.

I love that. And it's going to help us, like you said, maintain bone density and also build muscle. And that's one thing that I've really noticed as a 55-year-old woman, when I work out regularly, I am able to build muscle in a way that feels impressive to me compared to when I was younger. And I do think it's the increase in human growth hormone that fasting gives me.

It makes sense, right? I mean, if you're not exercising your third of the growth hormone release, you could be. If you're not sleeping right, a third. If you're fasting, a third, and who even thought that fasting would be one of those rare mechanisms for releasing it? That's that. In terms of estrogen and testosterone, when you're in a fasted state, those hormones actually go down.

But the interesting thing is when you reintroduce food, you get this giant pulse, like 200% or more. And so I wish we could almost do a growth curve or a curve of like the release versus the increase. And if that overall is a net positive, I suspect it is.

But that also could explain why people are able to maintain bone mass, muscle mass during a fasted state. Even though in theory, the going thought is, oh, you're going to break down all the wrong stuff. You're going to eat your muscle for energy. And it's the body's smart. If you are in a caloric deficit,

But you're eating all day long, well, you're not going to have the growth hormone released to signal to your body. Hey, don't break down muscle. If you eat the same number of calories and you're still in chloro deficit, but in the confined window, well, now you have this growth hormone release that might allow you to lose the right weight. Your insulin is low and you're able to tap into your fat stores for fuel so well during that fasted part of the day.

You know, Jason Fung has a great analogy that I love and it's, you know, imagine that you needed to burn a fire, right? You wanted to burn a fire in your living room because the power was out. Would you chop up the couch and burn that? Not if you have a wood pile, you wouldn't, you'd go to the wood pile and you'd get the wood and you'd burn the wood.

And so when we think about it, that wood pile was stored there for us to make the fire. Our body fat is stored there for us to use as fuel. Not our valuable muscle mass. The body is not so dumb that it would turn a muscle mass if you had plenty of fat, if it can get to the fat. And that's where the clean fast makes such a difference because your body's like, all right, well, I'm not going to chop up the sofa, my lean muscle mass. That makes no sense. I'm going to go to the wood pile, my stored fat.

in and use that but it's different than when you're doing that low calorie diet where you're eating all the time and again you don't have the human growth hormone going on your insulin is high. There are so many factors that keep you from getting to the wood pile into excellent analogy and again it's not to say that people want like I might say to myself hey naturally lose the weight that you need avoid gastric bypass or use intermittent fasting don't do the caloric deficit in grace all day now as a medical doctor.

I also just want the person to go from morbid obesity to just a normal weight, like whatever we can do to get them there. Now, I do think intermittent fasting, particularly the way we're describing is the best way to do it. But at the same time, it's trying to meet a person on their level, therapeutically, clinically. Sometimes you have to kind of give people credit to say, at least the guy is in a caloric deficit, finally, or he's not going to McDonald's, but maybe he's still reaching for the wrong foods, that type of stuff.

I don't want to be totally without empathy, but I will say, though, sometimes it's tough to see how effective these particular methodologies are, techniques are, and not want to just scream when a person's trying to get to some progress and they're not utilizing those tools. In that regard, I think we got to show some empathy, but at the same time, we got to be proud and loud about stuff that's most effective.

But I don't want to discount other methods that people use to make some progress. Like I'm not going to tell people don't do gastric bypass that are 800 pounds, right? Even though they probably could be eventually with intermittent fasting, you have to consider the whole situation. You might then put someone on intermittent fasting plan in parallel with gastric bypass eventually. There's a huge program that you have to consider and you might have to shift your strategy a little bit as you move into different phases of therapy.

Yeah, and I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, we know that intermittent fasting is here, but there are so many tools that doctors have to use with patients depending on the severity of the issue. And you have to pick and choose what that particular patient needs and meet them where they are. That makes a lot of sense. But spreading the word of intermittent fasting, it's a tool that everybody can pull right in. And in your religion and Greek Orthodox, seven is that when you said that y'all start

Yeah, we started seven. We started seven. It's a funny thing. You know, when I first wrote the book, I told a lot of people, Hey, you know, I think the office died pretty much for adults, maybe late teenagers. But I mean, as the metabolic profile of kids is more and more compromised. I mean, there are even doctors putting six year olds on a Zen pick. Yeah, I've seen that that breaks my heart. It's really sad. Now I will say this. I mean, there's no reason that a six year old is morbidly obese, unless their parents allow them to be.

Well, it's the food choices in the home, right? You know, I didn't understand all that when I was a young mother. Look, you're going to think I'm an idiot. But when I was a young mother and my boys were little, I didn't know. I hadn't learned all the things that I know now. I bought you who. Are you familiar with you who? Okay. I bought you who.

Because if you look at the nutritional information it is chock full of vitamins and minerals that they supplement into there. And so i'm like this is a much healthier choice than milk i feel so crazy thinking about that now that knowing what i know.

But I was just reading the nutritional facts and I had been, I guess, brainwashed by the health education I'd received growing up in America where we learned about vitamins and minerals and take your Flintstones, right? So nobody said they just said, you need vitamins and minerals. They didn't say, no, you need real food because real food is giving you things. We don't even know what those things are. And the Flintstones vitamin can't give it to you.

We are doing such a terrible job teaching Americans about nutrition. You know, I can remember when I was in high school, I worked at a fast-food restaurant, Long John Silver's. You ever been to a Long John Silver's? Sure, sure. I used to go to a lot as a kid. A lot of their food was fasting.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's fried everything. I would go home and smell like fried everything. My hair. But but I can remember one day being there as a teenager and somebody came in a mom came in with her family and the kids said, I would like a Coke and the mom said, no, get orange soda. It's better for you.

Oh, like I was 16 and I knew that didn't sound right. But that mother genuinely thought that the orange soda was better for her child. And so we're just not, we got to do a better job. Yeah. To be sympathetic though, I mean, the reality is this, America is trying to figure itself out.

You know, we've gone through different phases of development and there's been so much change, industrial, technological. And so what used to be just part of your culture that took care of you. And I've seen this. I mean, I'm Greek. I've been around my whites from Poland. You go to these places in the world and they have this solidarity of culture. Like you go to Poland and they eat a lot of meat and sausage, but like they also have horseradish with it.

And you go on to find out that the horseradish is actually lowers blood pressure and allows you to digest the food a little more easily. It's like, oh, this is not a coincidence. What happened in America, I think, is that it was such a melting pot that eventually we just became vanilla. And like all of those things that used to go with like beans and rice, we just ended up eating the rice.

and then putting a whole bunch of something else on the rice and like forgetting the beans. And so in that regard, we've restarted the whole historical clock. Like culturally, what used to be for the past several thousand years, maybe there are a lot of people that also were reaching for like the wrong foods 2000 years ago, but they figured out after generation, this wasn't good for you. Well, now there's this culture that reinforces all of that. I mean, again, you think about religion as a mechanism to passing on culture.

you know, whether you're a Muslim and you're doing Eid preparation for Ramadan and you're not eating all day. I mean, that's a form of intermittent fasting. Various other cultures have forms of it. Like I said, I'm Greek Orthodox line of things, but all of this keeps you healthy despite not having the technology. And it's really even shouldn't be something that you have to be aware of. Like when it's part of your culture, it's just something you do. And I know that to some extent, we all want to be liberated from our past in America, but the reality is it's like,

Well, then be prepared to go through a generation of two where you have to figure it all out again. Well, I also think, you know, you talked about how you had like seasons of different things in the church. I really think if we go back, you know, wherever our ancestors are from around the world, everybody listening in different places,

they ate what was there, right? You know, you ate what was there and there wasn't an orange soda. And it was like, the beans were there, the rice was there, the squash was there, wherever you lived, or maybe you were in the Arctic Circle and you ate the whale and the whatever you could find and the cold. But

You ate what was seasonal and what was available and what you could find to those in new it's that lived up there in the arctic circle in the very brief part of the year where there were plants they were eating all the plants they could. You know and people did seasonally just out of necessity because that's really all you could do and so i've always been fascinated with that idea that. Wow we really we weren't eating the same in december as we did in july in any part of the world people change.

I also think, too, what's so brilliant about intermittent fasting is that it recreates that feast and famine cycle in 21st century civilization. And that is such an important point, because as we ascend into convenience and predictability and the sky's the limit, you need something there to keep you raw and sober and in touch. I use this analogy in my book. We take a polar bear.

largest land predator in the world. This thing was born for the cold. It thrives in the Antarctic. It kills animals that are tons in terms of size. I mean, swims 80 miles, 100 miles out of sea, just powers through it. Let's solve its problem.

Let's say, you know what, you've been working really hard in that cold. Let's just get you out of the cold. Let's put you in this Sahara. It's never cold there. You'll be so much more comfortable. I feel like what we've done is we've taken our ancient core and we've put it into a place where we no longer have those problems and you can't criticize the thing that made you strong. You can't criticize the thing that made you great. It was the cold that made the polar bear amazing and all this struggle. Now,

I don't want us to go back to the days of infant mortality, women dying during childbirth, a pneumonia taking out a 15 year old that could have lived a long life, by all means. But this is where I think intermittent fasting can kind of come in and kind of reconnect us with that rawness of the world around us and sort of it's self-inflicted, but so is like going to the gym. So is anything. And so you have to mimic these conditions. And I think intermittent fasting is just a brilliant way to do it. And wow, what a health benefit it brings.

Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about how you live your life, what your day is like, your fasting approach that you do most days or all days or whatever that might be.

Well, first of all, every nurse and doc I work with is like, Oh, Dr. Petitis doesn't eat. He's not in here. And like, meanwhile, I'm like a six, three, 260 pound guy. I'm a pretty big dude. You're not wasting away at a nothing Pete. Exactly. I'm not at all. Which again, try telling my Polish mother-in-law that like when I'm not eating meat and she's just like, Oh my gosh, she's an anorexic. I'm like, no, you know, I think it's technically like below 18%. And you have to have like malnutrition signs. I'm like, I'm not that. I'm not at all in terms of body fat.

The point is that my day essentially is shift work so i work nine to twelve hours sometimes sixteen hour shifts in the e r can be night shifts it can be middle of the day middle of the night whatever holidays. I have four kids i've been married seventeen years i'm forty at this point i guess and so.

Essentially, my day is all over the place, but I try to work into it where I'm only eating about four hours a day. For me, I do a little bit more stringently. So, every once in a while, I'll do a 36-hour fast, just for some extra clarity and sort of reset.

intermittent fasting every day. And depending on the schedule of the year, I mean, I eat a lot of meat, I eat a lot of dairy, but when it's time for me to fast Orthodox style. And again, I'll peel back the onion as it goes. But eventually, as I cycle through the eye, I have this trust that like the church knows what's supposed to happen. And it's trying to keep me and my family alive. And it's trying to keep me from having neurodegenerative disorders and hypertension and cardiovascular disease and heart attacks and stroke and 80% of all disease.

You know, like the salve is right there. I just find this so fascinating, like the anecdote to 80% of suffering and tragedy in the world is literally within our diet and specifically as we intermittent fast, and I would say as we fast orthodox style, but point is like, we don't want none of that. I think what we need to do is we need to accept the challenges that we have so we can avoid the tragedies that are coming or could come.

my day is always a reminder as I take care of my next sick patient, it could be a grandmother, it could be an infant, it could be a child. Every day I'm reminded that life is short and that tragedies do happen and 80% of them are entirely preventable. And as you scale that up from like the patient I see to the community, I'm a part of to the nation that's going bankrupt, like

We have a huge problem coming and as human beings lose touch because a lot of them are not like you like a lot of people don't find a problem and try to solve it they're just like trying to figure out how to ignore it or maybe a pill they could take which again only has so much success.

I don't know how things will look in another 10, 15 years as the baby boomers really become true senior citizens with 20 different medications. Each one's going to be on great for the pharmaceutical companies, but it's not going to be good for your ER. It's not going to be good for your hospital. And it's not going to be good for our financial state of things. So I'm just endlessly reminded of this reality in my ER and it makes me even more motivated to live a lifestyle that's preventative and that can save me and my family and my community from a lot of problems.

Well, I love that you found intermittent fasting so early in your life as a part of your, your training, your research on healthy practices and then you connected it back to your religion and had all those aha moments of, oh, not only do I understand why we do this in my religion, I understand why those monks live so long. I understand why they're so healthy and I can apply this to myself and to my patients and through my book, the author's diet,

for people who want to change their own lives and their own health trajectory. So Dr. Pete, you and I will be, you know, talking again in 50 years. Yeah, I'll be 105. But that's fine. Yeah, we'll be able to talk about you'll be you'll be 90. So look younger than we do now, hopefully. I don't know about that. Now, look, I know that, uh,

may look good for 55, but I'm starting to see my grandma, my Calhoun's face coming out like my little, she had so many wrinkles and I used to just love her wrinkles, but now I'm starting to get them. So I don't know. You look great. You look phenomenal. And I really appreciate talking to Jen about all of this. I think this really will make a massive difference to people as they intermittent fast for their health, for their minds, for their spiritual state, for their families. And

Like I said, no one wants to be in the ER on Christmas Day or Easter or for the reunion. And these are real practices that don't just give you a potential six-pack, but literally beyond the vanity has huge impact on health. And that's what it's all about, really is just about health.

Well, I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind. You know, I like to call intermittent fasting the health plan with the side effect of weight loss. And we really need to keep it that way. You know, this episode comes out in early January. People are probably like, okay, the holidays are over. I'm ready to start losing some weight.

But I want people to always think of intermittent fasting as more than just, how can I get in back into my gold jeans? I want you to think of it as literally something, Dr. Pete, that can change your entire health trajectory for life. Yeah. Amen. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. And everybody, again, that was the author's diet.

And that is spelled A-T-H-O-S, and you can look up Dr. Pete Patisis. Does that say it right again? Patisis has been a while since I practiced it. And his work. And thank you so much for being here today. Thanks, Jen. Do you have an intermittent fasting story to tell? Email me at Jen at intermittentfastingsstories.com, and I'll add you to the lineup.

That's G-I-N at intermittentfastingstories.com. The world wants to hear your story. That's it for today. Remember, I may have a doctorate, but I'm not a medical doctor. So don't use anything you hear on this podcast as a substitute for medical advice. Please always check with your doctor or healthcare provider if you have medical questions. I'll talk to you next week, Fasting Family, where we will hear another inspiring story. Have a great week and fast on.

Intermittent Fasting Stories is edited, mixed, and mastered by resonate recordings. To learn more, visit them at resonaterecording.com or email them at hello at resonaterecording.com. Intermittent Fasting Stories listeners will receive a free offer if you mention that you heard it on the podcast.