The Fasting-Feeding Reset
How to stack supplements to accentuate both the fasting and feeding state, simultaneously optimizing for cleaning house and rebuilding healthy tissue.
Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor and this is not medical advice. Clear any fasting protocol with your doctor and read the “Fasting Is Not For Everyone” section thoroughly.
I first started coming up with the idea of stacking supplements to accentuate the fasting and fed states for a consulting client who had suffered terrible damage from ciprofloxacin (“cipro”), colloquially called getting “floxxed.”
More recently, I developed it further as part of my COVID Vaccine Guide.
In my most recent live Masterpass Q&A, a member asked,
I'm trying to make both my fed and fasted states as robust as possible so that I can reap the benefits of the fed state, such as muscle growth, but also the benefits of the fasted state, such as autophagy. My question is, what are some of the best practices of making both the feeding and fed states pronounced as possible?
I realized it is time to publish this as a very broad, widely applicable approach to accentuate the fasting state for optimal cleanup of damaged and no-longer-useful tissue and the fed state for optimal rebuilding of healthy tissue.
The principle of this approach is that, in the fasting state, dysfunctional mitochondria, immune cells, and other cells are digested; then, in the fed state, fresh cells and mitochondria are regenerated. Animal experiments suggest that such a protocol leads to a “reset” of the immune system.1
Fasting Is Not For Everyone
Fasting is not for pregnant or lactating women, children, people healing from acute injury, or people with metabolic disorders that impair energy metabolism in the fasted state.
Pregnancy and lactation are extremely energy-intensive. In these conditions, fasting should not be used. In fact, fasting can cause ketoacidosis in lactating women even if they are not diabetic.2 The same animal experiments that suggest fasting-refeeding can achieve a healthy immunological reset in adults also suggest it can cause lasting damage to the immune system in children.3 While this is a generalization from mice to humans, there is broad concern that fasting could hurt growth in children.
Fasting has traditionally been the domain of the world religions, and these religions have traditionally exempted pregnant and lactating mothers, children, and people with illnesses or injuries where fasting would interrupt healing.
In an acute injury, energy-intensive rebuilding is the overwhelming need, and fasting would risk interrupting the supply of that energy.
Finally, there are over 1,400 inborn errors of metabolism that are each individually rare on their own but collectively it is probably quite common to have carrier status for multiple of them. Two or more mutations in a pathway of energy metabolism that has heightened need during fasting, such as fatty acid oxidation, glycogenolysis, or gluconeogenesis, could make fasting difficult for many people and dangerous for some people.
I personally believe I fall into this category and I would not use this protocol myself for that reason. I will write more about this in the future.
In my view, the fasting-feeding reset is ideal as a try-it-and-see approach for a chronic illness that has no evidence of being rooted in an inborn error of metabolism. This may not always be easy to figure out, because adult-onset inborn errors of metabolism are often triggered by an acute illness, injury, or toxic insult. However, whenever it is unclear, my belief is that we should be guided by careful attention to our response. Fasting should feel gentle and easy, and no one should push themselves through the depths of hangriness and hypoglycemic hell to achieve a hypothetical heaven of health on the other end.
When an acute event such as the toxic insult is the clear independent initiator of the chronic illness, I think that is the situation where this is most likely to help.
This is also a set of principles that you could play with on a cyclical basis in the interest of performance enhancement or longevity.
Many fasting-refeeding options are available. My contribution is not to select one over the others, but rather to emphasize that the refeeding part of the cycle is just as important as the fasting part, and to add supplements that may be able to enhance each part.