!!!Intermittent Fasting for

Women !

Interview with Brad Pilon!Hosted by Neely Quinn!

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Neely: Hi. I'm your host, Neely Quinn. And today, I'm talking with Brad Pilon of eatstopeat.com, which is a site all about intermittent fasting. So we're going to learn all about how intermittent fasting might be the key to help you lose weight, how to use it, when to use it, what precautions to take, if any. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Brad Pilon. Hello, Brad. !

Brad: Hey, Neely, how are you? !Neely: I'm great. How are you? !Brad: Very good, thank you. !Neely: Thanks for joining me today. !Brad: Thanks for having me. !Neely: Yeah. This is exciting because I've been following your stuff and reading

it for quite a while and it's good information for everybody to have. So first, let's start with you introducing yourself. Tell us a little bit about you. !

Brad: Sure. My name is Brad Pilon. In 2006, I wrote a book called Eat Stop Eat, which was an introduction to sort of my take on intermittent fasting. It was intermittent fasting and IF became a thing. So it was really just fasting at that time. People didn't really talk about it as being IF. There weren't really any other IF diet, et cetera. It was actually just my grad work that was done on what happens when people don't eat turned into a book. !

I didn't have anything else to do with the info. I didn't want to publish it as a hard copy. So thanks to a friend of mine named Craig Valentine, I was convinced to publish it online and I'd been doing that ever since. So my thing is, it's really intermittent fasting, my approach to intermittent fasting. Eat Stop Eat is my book and I'd been doing that, sort of supporting that and talking in that general arena since about 2006. !

Neely: Yeah. That's quite a long time. You probably have a little bit of information on this. !

Brad: Yeah. I've got a couple circles there. But, yeah. !Neely: In your book, you have a ton of references. You really dig into the

science of it. This isn't just like your opinion of this. !! 2

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Brad: Yeah, it was my undergrad thesis. So it was your typical science work that at the end of doing -- Sorry, not my undergrad. It was my graduate thesis. Undergrad thesis was something else. It was my graduate thesis. And you finish writing it and you're just going like, "Ah. I paid tens of thousands of dollars to write this, for the ability to write. What am I going to do with it?" So you kind of only have a couple options. !

You publish it in a journal where a couple hundred people get to see it. Or you make it available online. So I made it available online. It originally was only 72 pages of really long drawn out worn on sentences. And then over the years, it's been cut down to something people understand and expanded in areas where people would tell me, "I want to know more about that part." So then I could go back to my work, expand that part out. So it's almost been a crowd source work, if you want to kind of look at how it progressed. !

Neely: Yeah. I mean, in my opinion, it's super layman friendly. It's really easy to read. !

Brad: Good. !Neely: Yeah. I'm sure you tried very hard to have it be like that. I mean, you

talk about your own experience with intermittent fasting. Can you talk about that a little bit? !

Brad: Yes. So I started, I guess, my work very anti-fasting. So it wasn't really intermittent at that time. So I was very much from the school of a meal every three hours, a ton of protein. This was '04, '05, I guess. So carbs were good. Saturated fat was bad. And everybody should just eat like a bodybuilder. Had you met me back then on this call, I'd be lecturing you about, "Like, Dude, you got to eat tuna and broccoli and sweet potato every three hours. Breakfast should be tuna." That kind of mentality. !

So when I started my work, my original plan was to kind of rip apart fasting because you're supposed to be eating. And then build my super ultra mega Brad diet on top of that. So when I first pulled a couple of papers on fasting, the main thing that struck me was I wasn't finding the whole metabolic slow down that everybody knew happen. Everybody knew this happens, so why weren't these papers finding these results? !

So I did what any good grad student does and I chuck those papers aside and looked for more that supported my own personal opinions. And it wasn't until we were five or six papers in where we're looking at men, then women, then obese men, then obese women, the lean men, the lean women, and even like some kids. I'm like, "Huh." Metabolism may

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not change that much in like 24 to 72 hours. So what else do I think I know of? Actually, no. !

And that's how I kind of dove into fasting. The original work was anywhere from 12 hours of fasting to 72. And then even though my work encompass that entire time period, my own self experiments while doing my work really made me realize that 72 is doable but not on a regular basis and not for the average person who wasn't like a grad student with nothing else going on. !

So it had to be shorter and it had to be something people will remember. That's where 24 came from. It had to fit in with people's lifestyles. That's when the 24 became divided between two days, so you eat every day. Because Lord knows people who do business meeting, et cetera, you can't just walk into a lunch meeting and be like, "Oh, I'm not eating but let's talk business." You can't, not at work. !

And then the once or twice a week because the purpose is still people to eat. This isn't a reason not to eat. It's a reason to eat. I don't want you to take intermittent breaks from fasting to stop yourself from going back to fasting. It's supposed to be more a reset, more of a break from eating. So that's the way it was designed. It progressed as, I guess, along the same lines as I was doing my research, the progress in the exact style was really based on what people could do and couldn't do combined with what they actually needed to do. !

And most people don't need to fast every single day or for days on end. You just need little breaks, little adjustments throughout the day that allows them then on the other days to eat the way they want to eat. When you're dealing with post and grad students, they want to eat the way they want to eat. So the actual change has to be minimal. And so that was sort of my progression, is realizing that the world's best diet doesn't work unless you want to do it. !

And so that was a lot of what we discovered in a long line of studying intermittent fasting, is it has to be accessible to as many people as possible. And that was kind of my journey through there into the way it is like right now. !

Neely: Okay. So I want to back up a little bit because I want to explain to people who don't know what intermittent fasting is or like what other people think about fasting in general. !

Brad: Good idea. !! 4

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Neely: So when you were doing your research, you were trying to find evidences that supported your hypothesis and what other people thought was that when you fast, your metabolism slows down, right? !

Brad: Your metabolism slows down, you lose muscle, you become lethargic, tired, cranky, and just about any other bad thing happens. That's what we were taught from a sort of bodybuilding early 2000s fitness arena. !

Neely: Right. So then you started going through the research and you started finding out that if you're fasting for no more than 72 hours, those things actually don't happen. !

Brad: Right. So what we found was if 72 hours or under, a lot of the changes I expected to see weren't happening. And, in fact, your resting metabolic rate was very resilient to these small changes. And then your muscle mass is just, your muscle metabolism isn't that quick. You don't lose pounds and pounds of muscle in three days. It's exactly how you don't build pounds and pounds of muscles in three days. !

And then a lot of the other things in terms of cognition, memory, how you feel. A lot of that has to do with managing expectations of food rather than the actual active eating the food. And that's when I realized, okay, maybe this fasting thing is something we could use to help us lose weight, to control our diet. !

Neely: Okay. So you have found that using intermittent -- And so, can you actually define the term intermittent fasting? !

Brad: Well, it changes for everybody. And it's one of those things that, depending on who you're talking to, a fast could be a juice fast or what have you. So my definition was a prescribed period of time where you did not consume anything that contained calories and that was it. So water is fine. Black coffee was fine. Even diet pops were fine in all of the trials. But the main thing is there was no calorie intake and there was a prescribed period of time. !

So to be intermittent fasting, you also had to be eating. And the way I view fasting as opposed to kind of starving is that you're the one who decides when you eat again. So you're not just not eating until you possibly can't do it any longer and you start eating again. You're looking at the clock and being like, "Okay, I'm going to start eating again at 2:00." And at 2:00, you start eating again. So that was kind of my definition. It was self-prescribed. It was no calories at all. Fluids and there you go. !

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Neely: Okay. And what did you start seeing that was happening to people when they did this? !

Brad: The most interesting thing was not metabolic. It wasn't hormonal. It wasn't anything like that. It was watching people deal with the concept of not eating when they were used to or trained to eat. So everything was fine for the first couple of hours and then it was the time for the coffee and donut they always have. And it was really weird because they were starving. And I'm like, "You just ate three hours ago and what you want is a donut." !

Like if I replace that donut with carrots, you'd still be starving because you want a donut. And it made me really aware that a lot of how we eat on a day to day basis is based on habit. We would train ourselves into wanting certain foods with certain people at certain times and certain rooms and certain places. !

My hardest thing to do fasting isn't working out, is not running. It's not dealing with crazy kids. It's going to the movies. Because I expect M&Ms at the movies. To not get M&Ms at the movies is a crime. So now I just don't go to the movies when I'm fasting. But if that was one of the things that made me really aware of like, wow, we are trained to eat in certain ways. !

When I was doing my grad work, there was Tim Hortons, which is a Canadian coffee shop. There was one, two, three of them on my drive from my house up to the school. And I know exactly when ones I would stop at, at exactly what time depending on what class I was going to. And even on days where I was fasting, half the time when I pulled in, instead of ordering a black coffee, I'd be halfway through my order of a coffee with two cream and a donut or bagel or whatever I was having at that time, before I was like, "Oh, no, I'm fasting." !

And I'm not even hungry. I'm just doing this because I want to eat. The benefit of that was the next thing, when I wasn't fasting and I'm pulling in the same Tim Hortons, "Am I really hungry right now or am I just getting a bagel because I always get a bagel?" And that's what a lot of people will discover, just how entrained their eating habits were, how angry, that kind of hungry angry combo they got. They can have the foods they wanted. !

It wasn't even about the fact that you're fasting. It was about not getting the foods they wanted at the time they wanted it. And that was a big aha moment that you could use for breakthrough meeting, I meant fasting, to really change the view and your approach to eating all the times where you're not fasting and you're actually eating. Figuring out

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that you can wait. You don't need food to tide you over for the hour and a half because your friend was late in meeting you for lunch. !

You have the ability to delay meals and you have the ability to eat when you want. That was probably the biggest change. The biggest aha for me was the effect about learning about why you eat that you get from fasting, how that can translate into improved eating when you're not fasting. !

Neely: So it would help people too when they weren't fasting to just not eat maybe as much or not eat when they weren't truly, truly hungry and figuring out if they were truly hungry. !

Brad: You recognize food triggers. You recognize people who are the ones who generally try to push you into eating a bit more. For me, I recognize that I have certain friends and family who expect me to be a big eater. So when I go to their house for dinner, it's like, "Here comes Pilon." And they're like getting ready for the giant feast. And I realize that's just what they expect. And I try to meet that expectation. It's almost like a peer pressure thing. !

So it's getting used to the fact that there are a number of reasons that you eat and one of the minor ones is hunger and major ones are all just habit and expectation. !

Neely: Right. It's interesting because it kind of brings us back to probably early times when there wasn't food sometimes and so we just did have to fast for days at a time or hours at least. And so it seems like a pretty natural thing for our bodies to go through. !

Brad: Yeah. The time, the how long you want to fast for can change. But generally, just the idea of taking your break from eating, when you word it like that, it just kind of makes sense that you shouldn't actually be eating every hour of the day. Because really, going from a meal every three hours kind of became a meal to snack every three hours. I mean, if you throw coffees in there or a little snack, you're literally in a fed state all the time. !

I read this one article. It was a spoof, a comedy, but basically talking about how most of North America has adopted the one meal a day approach. It starts when you wake up and ends if you went to bed. It's funny but it's actually very true. We just kind of go through the days now grazing and finding food when we can. But the problem is we can find it whenever we want to. So a little awareness in terms of a break tends to go a long way for a lot of people. !

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Neely: Okay. So aside from the, obviously, really good mental aspects of doing intermittent fasting, what are the physical things that you've seen in people? !

Brad: So when you're fasting, depending on the size of your last meal. So you finished eating, you're like, "Okay, I'm done. I'm going to take a break." Anywhere from six to 12 hours later, it would have to be a big meal, you start to move in a position where you're burning predominantly body fat as a fuel source. And that's generally why people diet, is they want to burn fat. !

So here's sort of a guaranteed way to make sure that what you were indeed using to fuel your day is body fats. So the transition happens in six to 12 hours. If you're lucky and you timed your fast right and sort of eased up, eased all, that's generally while you're sleeping. So you kind of get this added benefit of you know that you're burning fat. You're not guessing it. You're not hoping that your secret concoction of proteins and carbs is making you a fat burning machine. You have no other choice. So you're burning fat. You're not burning muscle. That's generally one of those myths that just does not go away. !

Unless you're exceptionally, exceptionally lean, you're not earning muscle as a fuel. And if you are exceptionally, exceptionally lean, then I've got to ask you, "Why are you fasting?" So the average person, we're burning fat. That's what we do when we're not eating. And that's generally why we all buy it. So it's very nice to know that it's sort of working. There's no guess work at it. There's no "I wonder if that little bit of extra orange juice, the fruit just messed up my diet". None of that. !

It's just gone. There's no worry. There's no stress. You stop eating. Things are happening. The other really cool thing that happens is that after, let's say, 24 hours, the time frame you picked, you're done. You won. With most of the diet approaches these days, it's inevitable slow march to a mess up. Because you're expected to do it every single day for days on end, for months on end, for possibly a year. !

One of those days, it's going to be your friend's wedding or you have to go to Mother's day, your kid's school and you're going to eat something you didn't want to eat. And then it's over. No one just -- Not no one but most of them go, "Uh, I ate two cupcakes. Oh well, back on the saddle." You go, "I ate two cupcakes. I blew it. This diet is over. We're having pizza tonight and wings and I'm finishing the pie in the fridge." Then a week later you come out of your haze and you go, "I've got to start all over again." !

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And that's the typical problem with most diets. Whereas with intermittent fasting, when done the way I like it done, 24 hours and you're done. You're finished. You won. You did it. You accomplished it. You have a positive reinforcement that you're capable of going 24 hours without food. No matter how hard it was, you managed it. Now, you're eating and then a couple of days you might try it again. !

So that was the other big thing I noticed, was that you have this sort of good feeling of a guaranteed fat burn. You also have the shortness of it, the quick ending with a positive feedback that like I could do this. And so that's what I was really finding with most people, the hormonal benefits of it were combined with the sort of the ease of effectiveness and the positive reinforcement to kind of build upon itself. !

Neely: Okay. Are there any other physiological effects that you see with people? So they're losing weight. !

Brad: They're losing weight. They're not losing muscles. The giant end points we want, those are the two main ones. Physiologically, when you're taking blood management or any sort of respiratory management, so the amount of carbon dioxide you're breathing out, we have evidence of fat burning, and then in terms of the hormones, you have a bunch of things going on. You have insulin going down or growth hormone going up and depending on the person's slight changes in some of the norepinephrine and epinephrine. These are fat burning hormones. !

But in general, the whole thing is just so you can burn fat. Everything that happens during a fast is addressing the need for energy. The fact that it's not coming in from your food, the fact that you have a bunch stored somewhere in your body and it needs access to that. So when insulin goes down and growth hormone goes up, what you're creating is a situation where your body can release energy from your fat to be used as a fuel. !

So there's hundreds of things going on that are very, very complex. There's things that we haven't even discovered yet, new hormones or signaling molecules get discovered seems like monthly. But the important thing is everything isn't happening in concert just to allow you to burn fat. And the cool thing is as long as you're burning fat, you're generally preserving your muscle mass. Because most of us have enough body fat to survive a day or two. !

There are other people out there who are men at 6% body fat and women getting ready for a contest who are crazy low like 11% who might be more difficult for their fat to actually meet their daily energy needs. But again, I don't think those people need to be fasting. But for the rest

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of us normal human beings, we have enough. And then all the things that happen is just happening so that we can release that stored fat, that stored energy and use it to go for the day. !

The only other thing that happens is that there are alterations in the hormones that affect our blood glucose levels and the amount of glucose being released from our liver, to keep our blood glucose stable throughout a day of fasting. So keeping blood glucose stable, elevating fatty acids so that you can live off them and presto you have the fastest state metabolism. !

Neely: Okay. And how many times a week do you suggest people do this? Or how often? !

Brad: I'm a once or twice guy. And by once or twice, I mean, like if you want to do it every fifth day, cool. If you want to do it every Monday, Thursday, fine. Just Mondays, I'm cool with that too. The key is, for me, the main benefit is a break from eating. I don't want it to be a new lifestyle where you simply don't eat every day, one meal or something like that. There's lots of fasting protocols out there that are like that. And I have my opinions on them. Some are really smart, some not so smart. !

But in general, if it's just a rule of thumb, my style is once or twice a week, from 20 to 24 hours, somewhere in there. My view on fasting or intermittent fasting in general is the more frequent the fast, the lower the duration of the fast needs to be. So if you're fasting every single day, 12 to 16 hours is beautiful. Me personally, I'd go much farther than that. If you want to fast every other day, that's awesome. Do 16 to 20. !

You want to fast once or twice a week? 20 to 24? For some reason, you want to fast once every other week, maybe a bit above 24, probably not. I like to sort of tag it off there just to be accessible to everybody. So you follow those very simple sort of guidelines and now fasting is doable and it involves eating as much as you can as often as you can. I'm trying to word this properly. It's not all about the fasting. You're bouncing the fast in time with the fed time. And that's what I really want to see people doing. !

When it becomes an obsession to see how long you can go without food, I don't think we're doing ourselves much good if we take on that mentality. It really is just meant to be a break. !

Neely: Okay. So when you say if you want to do it every day, do 12 to 16 hours. What does that look like for a day? !

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Brad: Okay. So I really, usually 99.99% of us sleep at some point. So let's make sure we spend some of the fasting state sleeping. It only makes sense to sleep, right? So I'd always want it divided between two days. So let's say you're doing a 12-hour fast, you decide at 10 o'clock tonight you're like, "Done eating. I've had enough." Then tomorrow, instead of just getting up and grabbing a giant bowl of yogurt and eating it before you're even awake, I want you to take at 10:00 a.m. and figure out, "Am I hungry? What am I hungry for? What's my day look like?" !

And then eat at 10:00. The perfect 12-hour fast. You want to do 16? Now it's 10:00 to 10:00 plus four more hours. "You know what, I'm not hungry. I'm trying to lose weight. I can do four more hours." Anywhere in between that range. Maybe you'd say, "I can only do two more hours. Maybe screw this. At 10:01 I'm eating." But you've taken the time just to think. My favorite thing about that approach is the way it bookends. !

Because for some people, the mornings are problem. Before you even know what your day looks like or that know that you're hungry, you've eaten 1000 calories. Just because out of habit, you get up, you get cereal, you make a cereal, you get up and make your protein pancakes, whatever. And a couple of hours later, you finally had your coffee and you're awake. And so that's good job but you have 1000 calories in your day. !

The other thing is the nighttime one. Stop eating at 10:00. I find really interesting. Because for most people, a lot of bad things happen after 10:00. Because, A, you have to ask yourself why am I even up? And, B, if you are up, you have to ask yourself, why am I eating? I'm watching Breaking Bad, I do not need 1000 calories to support this. I could probably get a glass of water right now watching whatever is going on TV. So it's breaking those little secret spots that could do a lot of mindless eating. !

For me, if I eat past 10:00, I'm up until midnight guaranteed. Like there's no in between. There's no I'm going to snack at 10:00 but don't worry I'll be in bed by 10:30. It's like, okay, I'm going for 12:00 at the earliest. So for a lot of people, cutting that out saves them, if might only be for 500 calories but that could be the difference between a net loss of the day and I just stay the same. You combine that with maybe a little bit of extra eating in the morning, okay, now you've taken two days and turn them into slight losses instead of slight gains. And that can kind of roll in some pretty positive things. !

Neely: Okay. Yeah. Because after reading your stuff, I started experimenting with this for myself and I did the 14-hour fasting, 10 hours eating. So I would stop eating at 8:00. I would start eating at 10:00 and then I would

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stop eating at 8:00 again. And I actually lost a little weight and my energy levels were better. My mood was a little bitter. And I was a little bit less -- I had fewer cravings which I've heard a lot of people say. Are those common findings? !

Brad: Yeah. The cravings a lot is going right back to where I talked about what you want to eat, when you want to eat it out of habit. I mean, most cravings, not all, but most are not some sort of hormonal imbalance where you have to have chocolate, you are going to kill somebody kind of thing. Most of it is like, okay, bought kids Pop-Tarts. I know there's Pop-Tarts there. I really want. It's this like ongoing wanting. !

So by saying, "Too bad I can't have the Pop-Tart because I'm fasting. I'm just not going to have it yet," that gives people a lot of -- Takes the decision making out of it rather than the, "Okay, well, I'm going to go look at the macros on the Pop-Tart because maybe I can fit it in." And then you have one and you're like, "Well, I had a Pop Tart. I'm just going have the other one. It's going to go bad. They come in packs of two for a reason." !

And it's like, "Okay, well, there's only one more in the box. My kids shouldn't be having Pop-Tarts anyway so I'm just going to eat it." That's how it goes, right? And then you sit there going like, 700 calories later going, "What did I do? I totally just peer-pressured myself into eating things I don't want to eat." So a little break where decisions aren't being made. !You're like I don't have to decide what I'm putting in my coffee. I don't have to decide what I'm doing. I can walk through the kitchen to get the portable phone and make a phone call without stopping and checking if I need to eat something. And for a lot of people, just doing that occasionally, it translates later to less cravings and just sort of less sort of wandering eye of eating. !

Neely: Yeah. It's so funny too because I'm not like a night binger or anything but I stay up really late so I generally eat past 8:00. And when I started doing the intermittent fasting, I was like, "Well, I mean, who's going to stop me from eating?" But when you set that time, something happens in your brain and you're like, "I can't have it. It's 8:05." !

Brad: Exactly. Yeah. And same thing with the morning one. If you set your time and you're starting to eat at 10:00, then it doesn't matter if you get up at 6:00 a.m. or 9:30 a.m., you're like you've got to go until 10:00. Occasionally, I fly. I try not to. Occasionally, I have to go places and you do that horrible thing where you book like a 9:00 a.m. flight because for some reason it seemed like a good idea then when it actually comes to

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the time to go, you're like, "Uh, I'm going to be there two hours in advanced. And it's an hour away. I got to get up like 5:00." !

You still eat. Even though you normally eat like 7:00 or 8:00, the first thing you do is you eat. And then what happens when you get to the airport? You eat again because now it's time to eat. So you sneak in an extra meal. And that happens to a lot of people depending on their work schedules. So just saying I'm not eating until 10:00, again, it takes that habit out of it. These little sneaky things that come in and kind of ruin our best efforts. !

Neely: All right. So what about people who have blood sugar issues? When they wake up, if they don't eat immediately, they're unhappy, cranky and about to pass out. !

Brad: So there's two things going on there. One is a difficult one to talk about which is, in research, when we deal with people with blood sugar issues and we measure their blood sugar, it's stable, which is interesting because the important thing here is that we're not saying that people are lying. They are feeling the effects that we commonly associate with blood sugar. The issue is coming from something else. So that's one aspect, is that it might be habit, it might be blood pressure, who knows what it is. The fact is, they don't feel well unless they eat. !

The second group of people who legitimately have blood sugar issues and their blood sugar is all over the place. Well, the obvious thing -- I guess, not the obvious. The logical thing there is realize that it's real. Like you feel like crap. So one of two things. You slowly train yourself out of it by experimenting with fasting. Or you plan your fast so that you eat. You don't really have any other options because the truth be told, if it is a blood sugar issue, sometimes they slowly correct especially with the weight loss. !

Other than that, they don't. And you just, you got to roll with this. Same with people who can't do a 24-hour fast but can always like, "I can make it 22 every time and I just feel like hell. I tried to push through when I just can't do 24." You did 22 hours. You did amazing. Your thing is 22 hours. Done. Over. This was supposed to be logical. So if you're one of those people who has to eat in the morning, you eat in the morning and you adjust your fast around that. !

But generally there's a way to take your break from eating that works for you. And then that's the main thing I want to get across to stop eating is by keeping it very flexible, open to interpretation that you're not trying a style where you're supposed to fast for 23 hours every day and only eat for an hour. You try it, it doesn't work, so fasting isn't working, you move

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on. You're missing giant opportunities. So by keeping it flexible, you really have a way to play with the idea of, "I'm going to eat when I really want to eat." !

So I'm a breakfast person, I have breakfast. But you know what, I've never been a lunch person. For me, lunch is like my favorite meal of the day because the kids are not in the house and I can actually eat in peace. So generally, my fast go 2:00 to 2:00 and I'll have at each, so beginning and the end. Because that's my meal. So you got to play with these things and find out what works for you and then you move forward. !

Neely: Okay. So, I want to talk about what you suggest for people to eat when they are eating. And I actually want to touch a little bit more on the blood sugar thing because I actually have suffered from pretty bad blood sugar stuff before I was Paleo. And once I went Paleo, then I was able to do a little bit more of the intermittent fasting and I can eat at much larger intervals now because my blood sugar is much more stable. But you don't necessarily tell them to eat any particular way when they're eating? !

Brad: No. !Neely: Can you talk about that? !Brad: Yeah. So when we do diet advice, we do what I consider to be a very

geographically limited version of diet advice. ! So I tell people eat chicken and rice. But not everywhere in the world

eats chicken and rice for dinner. It's like a foreign food. That would be like me having sort of Chinese dish every morning in my diet. People are going, "What? Dumplings?" It's weird. So I don't think we can do that appropriately. I think that most people have ratios that they generally gravitate towards. Sometimes it's not the right ratio for them but generally there is a ratio that's right for them. !

And it certainly might be different from me. I mean, I will fight you tooth and nail if you take away my daily donut. There's no reason for me to every give that up. I won't do it. And so for me to tell other people that, "Neely, you have to have a donut every day because I have one," it's something going like, "Dude, it messes me up. It literally messes my blood sugar." Or even major impacts, right, because I'm going have an old-fashioned chocolate dip no matter what and you're not going to. !

Neely: Well, I wish I could have it, come on. !! 14

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Brad: I know, they're so good. But so, what I want people to do is just recognize that. There's some general things I like. So I like protein. I don't like boatloads of protein but I like higher than the RDA. I like roughly two times. For most people who are working out, I like that number. For fats, I like fats. I'm not an eat tons and tons of fat diet but I don't limit them. But I'm the same for carbs as well. So, generally, it's really hard to do, so the advice I give people is to eat like an adult. !

You're not a child anymore. It's not Halloween. You don't get to do the day after Halloween binge. And as an adult, sometimes life sucks. You have to pay taxes. You have to buy gas for your car. It really sucks that you want to go and buy a new jacket but your credit card is maxed, so deal with it. Same thing with it. It would be cool if we could just eat whatever we want. We can't. We're adults. If you were seven, you could do it. You might get sick. You'd learn your lesson, move on. !

And so that is my main nutrition message. Instead of being I'm dieting, I'm eating responsibly. It's part of growing up. It's just realizing that we get fat. Kids get fat too now but we were better at it than they are. So you have to kind of realize that you don't get to do everything you want. I would love. I have not been to Vegas drinking since I was in my 20s. But no matter how late I stay up drinking, my kids get up at the same time. So to be responsible, I just get don't get to do that. I get extra for rare occasions. !

So I get invited out to an event or you invite me out and you're paying for dinner, I'm eating. But in other times, I don't get to go up to the kitchen, grab the granola bars my kid lunches and eats the whole box. Because I know I shouldn't. And that's kind of how I approach it. So I don't care if you're Paleo. I don't care if you're vegan or Paleo vegan, whatever the case maybe. It's that when I see people eating out of control or like they're a child, then that's when I get concerned. !

So it's really awesome that organic peanut butter is Paleo. It doesn't mean you get to eat the entire jar watching TV. You get to eat it, just not the entire jar. It's really cool that, Brad, that you're into donuts but one a day is very different than one donut eating contest a day. So it's just taking things down to a responsible level realizing like everything else in life is completely unfair. There's consequences to what we eat. !

And there's no free ride. And I've tried every way possible to find a free ride where I can eat an entire box of donuts but then I did some push-ups and I'm fine. And for the first day, that works. And after two weeks, you're going like, "Ah, damn it. That could not work." So that's generally my take. Eat as becomes you and eat in the way that you enjoy. But

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remember that no matter what you decide to frame your eating around, you have to do it responsibly and you'll get great results. !

Neely: You should write a book called The Adult Diet. !Brad: People would hate me. !Neely: But it's true. I've really loved what you just said, actually. It doesn't

matter. Because, yeah, it doesn't matter if I tell people to eat Paleo, whatever. There's so many people who are like, "No, I'm not going to do that." And that's fine. If they are just eating sensibly and not too much, then if that works for them, then that's great. !

Brad: Generally, most of us have in the back of our head an idea when maybe we're being a bit silly. So you went out with your friends, you had dinner and you knew what you need to know. And at a dinner and a dessert at any restaurant is too much. Unless you're 6'8" and you play professional football, it's probably too much. But you do it anyways. And then the issue becomes at the end of that when you're like, "Okay, I've had enough. That was way bigger than you did. I had a dinner that I could split with three friends." !

And then because you're out celebrating something, I had dessert. There was a cheesecake that was size of my head. And now people are ordering an after drink, an after dinner drink. And I'm like, "Sure, why not?" And then all of a sudden, you get in the situation where it doesn't count. You found some reason to explain it away. And the response we're trying to do there is like, "No, I'm good. I'll have a black coffee." !

You have to sometimes pull the shoot, pull the trigger, whatever the case maybe and then stop it. And that's the key. That sort of maintenance level of just admitting that you only have to do these things responsibly and admitting that sometimes it sucks but you got to do it, is sort of the first step in keeping things under control. !

Neely: Okay. Moving along, I know that was some fasting protocol or intermittent fasting protocols. And I think you talked about this in your book. You have done fasting and then you eat like an entire days worth of food. !

Brad: Right, right. !Neely: Or you eat like way more in your non-fasting days. So how does that

affect the fasting? !! 16

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Brad: Personally, I think it sucks. And the reason I think it sucks is not the metabolic occurrences. I'm not going to argue with that somehow that causes to gain fat even though I don't see how it would. But my main issue is that what are we really teaching you? It's kind of weird delayed gratification. What I want you to do is fast and then when the fast is done, pretend like you'd never fasted and you eat the way you normally would. !

The idea of just pushing it all back into the end of the night and still getting to have whatever you want, I don't like the idea of binging or forced eating or forced over eating, any of that. And I think that that's a lot of that mentality. There are very few people, they exist, but there's few of them who act in the fast and literally can go, "Okay, I'm eating an entire days with the food now and that's kind of comfortable." !

A lot of people are doing it because they're supposed to or they're told to or it's kind of cool. They want to see if they could do it. It becomes a bit of a mental game where it wasn't that they were ravenously hungry and couldn't stop eating. If they were ravenously hungry and couldn't stop eating, my general advice that's worked the most for people is you have to experiment with your fasting start and stop times. !

So let's say you've fasted from 5:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and then you're just destroyed with hunger. All it takes sometimes is, "Okay, fine, fast from 8:00 to 8:00 and you're fine or 2:00 to 2:00 and that little snack you would have at lunch sort of sets you up." It has a lot to do with those little things more than it does the sort of need to eat. But in general, the idea of prescribing that, it's just not my cup of tea. !

My opinion is that we're already really good at eating. We're already really good at over eating. We don't need help in that area. So being told to do that is part of your fasting ritual, it's just not my thing. People might suggest it. They might have some sort of logic behind it. But in my experience, getting people to sort of use fasting as a reset more than a delay generally works better. !

Neely: Yeah. This is a little crazy making to like starve yourself and then go crazy on binging and then starve yourself and then binge again. !

Brad: Well, it's kind of like saving up your money so that you can then blow it all then wondering where your savings went. It's kind of the same idea. Generally, along the line of being an adult. You probably don't get to do that. Some people do and I'm sure that online you can find people who eat twice as much after their fast and still got down 12% body -- There's the stories and then there's the reality for you. And for most people

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listening, you're normal people like us, and it probably doesn't work that way where you get to eat whatever you want and still lose fat. !

Neely: Right. Okay, let's talk about women in particular. Have you noticed what works for women on this? !

Brad: Yeah. So couple of things. The women physiology is a lot like a guy's physiology with the exception of the body fat issue. What I'm getting into is when I tell guys, I'm like, "Okay, you fast, and then when you get really lean, I want you to cut down your fasting. And then when you hit like lean, like you're 6%, 7% crazy lean, I want you to not fast anymore because you don't have to fast anymore because you're done." !

Maybe once every ten days at 20 hours. And guys go, "Okay, cool, got it." My experience with women has been, when I say, "Okay, I want you the leaner you get, the less I want you to fast because, generally, what I want you to do is as you lose body fat, I want you to increase calories so you meet somewhere in the middle where you're eating to support your brain and your awesome body." And most women look at me and they go, "Yeah, totally." !

I'm going to go, "So, as you get lean, I want you to cut down the fasting." And they go, "Okay, totally." And then I get a picture of them and I go, "Holy crap, you look amazing." And I go, "You're still fasting twice with 24 hours and dieting." And they go, "I'm not lean." And I go, "You look amazing. You're 18% body fat and you're almost getting like unless you're competing in a fitness contest, I don't know if you need to get much leaner." "I want to hit 12%." !

And I'm like, "Why?" So I get caught up with that. And then being a guy, it's very hard for me to tell you what you should or should not look like, so I kind of have to step back. But so in general, the rule of thumb is the less body fat you have, the less you should be dieting. When you say it out loud, it makes perfect sense. But what we all do is the leaner I get, the further into my diet I get, the less I eat. And if you think about it, when you say it out loud, it didn't really make that much sense. !

Because what you're trying to do is get rid of the fat while supporting your body. Your fat is providing the fuel. It's filling in the gap between what you need to eat in the day and how much you actually did eat in the day. That little gap there is made up by your body fat. You're going to get to a point in your leanness where your fat can't make that up. And then that's when physiological changes start happening so that you can use a little muscle mass or so you bring down your calorie expense for the day to kind of make up that gap. !

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So mostly what I find with women is that realizing when you are in fact lean, that lean is not always going to look like an 18 year old fitness model. We're going to store it in weird spots. Also realizing that 18 year old fitness models only look that way in their perfect picture on the day of their photo shoot and that's the one picture of the 400 they took. So we tend to have this false reality of what looks good. !

Whereas guys, we're 15% body fat, we think we're nine. We tell people we're eight. It's a bit of a different mentality. So that's what I find with women, the reluctance to bring the calories back up the leaner they get. And just remembering that the goal was never to fast all the time. The goal was to use fasting so that we could eat the food we want to eat when we want to eat them. Problem is that unfortunately fasting works well. And so if fasting for a day and you're like, "I went down a little bit." !

And then a couple of days later, you fast and you, "I went down a bit more." And so you think, what if I diet in between my fasts? And now you're starting go down like this, "All right, now I'm going to add another fasting." You see results and it's weird because you have some long haired hippie guy telling you to slow it up a bit and, in general, you don't want to hear that. So I find a lot of it is psychological. I also find that women are way more hardcore than guys. !

So a guy is like, "Yeah, you know, a fast got tough around the 20 hour mark so I stopped it." Girls are like, "It got tougher on 16 but I just suffered through to 20." You're way more disciplined in general. I'm making girls generalizations. But it leads a situation where you'll diet even when you feel like hell. You'll just keep going. Again, giant realizations. So with women, similar to men, what I want is the leaner you are, the less you need to fast. !

And if you have problems with 24, try 22, try 20, try 18. If you're fasting once or twice a week for 16 hours and you're getting results but feel great, I'm cool with it. The issue is whenever you get to a situation where you're fasting but don't feel great but you continued to fast. Guys and girls. Women tend to be more vocal about what it doesn't feel great. Guys tend to sort of, they just either give up or push through but they don't actually talk about the feelings behind it, god forbid. !

My general experience with women is that sometimes we need to be coaxed to fast a little less, which is mind-blowing because in '06 I had to convince people just to try it once. Now I just tell people -- I'm sitting here telling people like I know I wrote the book but I want you to not do it every day. I don't understand what's going on. It's temporary. And again, it's sort of, to use sort of the same example, you fast like responsible adult.

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! If you're pulling off three 20-hour fasts in a week and then on the third

one, you keep feeling hell or your energy levels are down, the logical thing is to play with the fast. You can either just stop, which is completely fine, or you can try shorter fasts or less often. It's just really important to not take my book or anybody else's book or website as some sort of a gospel and just realize that got a cool tool and I'm going to use it in the way best for me. !

And that way, it's going to change month to month whether you're lean or not or stressed at work or not or you just started, you decided you're going to start training for a triathlon but you keep a diet the way it was before, you might run into some problems. You might need to fast less. Because you're expending more energy. So as long as you're sort of thinking your way through it, it's not going to be a problem. !

It's when you're really trying to square peg a round hole into your life and it no longer fits, is when people get to a lot of problems. !

Neely: Have you noticed a trend with eating windows and fasting windows that do better with women? !

Brad: Yes and no. In general, what I'm finding is that the leaner the woman the less of the length the fast needs to be. I do find in the, for some reason, when you fast -- There's some styles of fast where during the fast you're allowed to have things whether it's like amino acid pills or small amounts of protein or fruit or coffee or coffee with milk in it. Whatever the case may be, when you're kind of sort of maybe almost fasting, there's a weird stress there and people do not do well long term on that from my experience. !

I think you go from the decision is done, I'm not eating to the decision is heightened, now I have to eat the right things and is this the right amount or not the right amount. I'm pretty sure that scoop was 20 grams of protein. What if it was 22? That kind of stress kind of builds up and makes the fast very effortful instead of effortless. So people who complicate the fast extend the fast times. Stop fasting on top of dieting or drastically change the workout routine without altering their diet to kind of match are the ones that have the most problems. !

Neely: Okay. So I have a question about coffee because when everybody started getting into intermittent fasting, I got a little bit worried because a lot of people are fasting and they were just using coffee to like-- !

Brad: Yeah, pots of coffee, right? !! 20

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Neely: Yeah, pots of coffee. And for anybody who already has any thyroid issues or adrenal burnout, that to me just sounds dangerous. What was your thought on it? !

Brad: If you are a two cup of coffee person when you're not fasting, I want you to be a two cup of coffee person when you're fasting. Otherwise, you're going to be crutching. We are using some sort of thing to replace food as opposed to just simply "I'm now not eating". And it's kind of like people who come to me and they're like, "Wow, I read that celery is a negative calorie food so when I'm fasting I eat three pounds of celery." But you're still eating. Yeah, you've won the calorie math on paper game. You're still eating. !

And the problem with that is that all the stuff we talked about earlier, the food habits, that kind of thing, they tend to fall apart when you do that. So to be perfectly honest, if you're a two-cup person when you're not fasting and let's say you're a three cup person when you fast, I get it, cool. If you're a 'I don't drink diet pop when I'm not fasting but I have one when I'm fasting', cool. !

If you're the 'I'm eating 18 packs of gum when I'm fasting and I could do' -- You're trying to work this system. And it never almost always wins. It never works when you're trying to game the system. So the three pots of coffee while I'm fasting and that's how I get through, you're trying to game a system. That's going to catch up. Shortcuts, ways to sort of beat the house card counting, all that kind of stuff, when it comes to your body, it's so much smarter than you are. !

Like I know you all think we're brilliant but your body is way smarter than you. So there's going to be repercussions to your actions. So in general, I want you to be as close to fasting as possible. I want you to increase your water intake? Yes, because a large proportion of the water you take in any given day is from your food. So I want you to replace that extra glass or two of water, great idea. If you're two cups of coffee, like I said, and you're going up to three, I'm not judging you. !

If you're two cups of coffee but you go to three pots when you're fasting, you're just -- I'm positive you can do without it. So let's try and see what happens. That's generally my opinion on that. !

Neely: Let me see. We can wrap this up pretty soon, but how has it been working for you? Like you've been doing this for a long time. It seems like you do it pretty consistently. And you're saying that for a lot of people, they get leaner and leaner and leaner and then they have to stop. But you seem to do it on a regular basis. !

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Brad: Yeah. I'm not a fitness competitor. I am not an Instagram 6% body fat six pack ab guy taking picture of myself on the gym all the time. I'm generally around 10% to 12%. I'm at a level where at a kid's pool party I can be the dad that takes the shirt off and doesn't wear a shirt into the pool. I'm slightly narcissistic, slightly vain but not to the level where I'm ever competing. So at 10% t0 12%, what I find is that I can fast once to twice a week for about 20 hours for that one. It's all that really takes. !

And then all the other days, I eat, well for me, depending on your opinions on diet, I could eat borderline crap. So it kind of balances everything out. If it sneaks up, my brother-in-law owns a bakery in the summer, an amazing bakery. Summer is hard for me. Nothing like coming home and it's like, "Hey, I've got three different key lime pies, one made with egg, another one made with just egg yolk and one is egg substitute, can you try them and let me know what's best?" !

They do that kind of stuff to me. So generally midway through the summer, I'm back up to once or twice a week for 24 hours and sort of fixing. January or February, when everybody is in like three sweaters up here in Canada, it's generally I'm at my leanest because I don't care at all during winter about food. I'm a barbecue and bakery type of guy. Then I might be down to one fast every five or six days because I'm just sort of maintaining my leanness. !

So I do play with it. It's never more than 24 hours, never more than two times a week. I take weeks off occasionally if I'm experimenting new things to blog about that never ever has ended well. So I've never gotten to a point where I like taking two weeks off is totally worth it. I've never said that. But it has been nice occasionally to really look at what I'd been eating on days in between fast and ask myself if I wasn't fasting, would I just be gaining a lot of weight here? !

And then taking some time off to kind of adjust and make sure that I'm being responsible. But so it has allowed me to maintain in a spot where if I had to do a photo shoot and get all prettied up, if I had a couple of weeks, I could do it. But at the same time, it allows me to kind of live a life where people call me up today and they want to go up for a barbecue, I'm not going to say no. I'm not actively hardcore dieting for anything. And I know that I've kind of got everything under control with the combination of fasting and eating that I have going for me. !

So that's generally it. I mean, since 2006, I was up in the 200, 205 and that was kind of leftover from the bodybuilding days and you had to bulk up. And then with fasting, I got down into the 170s. And I'm generally been there ever since. So hopefully keep going. !

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Neely: Yeah. It seems like a super reasonable way for you to eat. It seems like it fits your personality. !

Brad: If fits me. It fits my personality. Really all I've done in the last six years, seven years is just figure out what parts of dieting is actually important to me, what do I actually need to be obsessive about and what don't I? What do I naturally eat? No problem. And when I have to remind myself that it might be a good idea for me to reach for that. So that's a little bit of take that I do during the eating period but nothing extreme. !

Neely: Yeah. All right. Any last words for women wanting to use intermittent fasting for weight loss or health? !

Brad: Yes. Okay. So try it. And then play with it. So Eat Stop Eat is generally 24-ish hours, once or twice a week, which means you don't have to pick once or twice. It could be one time. It could be one every five days. So maybe once this week, twice the next. 20 or 24, it doesn't mean you have to pick one. I'm 21 and a half hours guaranteed every time. One day like it's going fine, I'm on the road, I'm in traffic, I can't stop for hood anyways, go for 24. !

On a days when your 21 hours into a fast, you want to hit 24, your best friend calls you, she's in town, she wants to go and eat, go get something to eat with your friend. I want that kind of balance. And find the times to work for you. I have days that just were beautiful. I mean, a Sunday, Monday fast for my lifestyle is always, that one is sort of been there. And then the other days I change based on what's going on. !

It used to be a Thursday, Friday fast. It was just beautiful for me. And then things change with the kid's schedules and it never works. And so I did Wednesday, Thursday instead. Sometimes even Saturday, Sunday if I was traveling and didn't want to eat the crap food. You just have to be flexible with it. And if you're flexible with it, you find a way to make it work as long as you'll still be responsible when you're eating and not using fasting as an excuse to binge or gorge and that kind of thing. !

Neely: All right. Sounds good. !Brad: That's it. Perfect. !Neely: How do people find out more about it? !Brad: All right. So my blog is bradpilon.com and the book is eatstopeat.com

and the book's title is Eat Stop Eat. Nice and simple. Generally, those are two best places. If you're kind of unsure, I'm on Facebook and I'm on Twitter and I have weird pictures of me and my cats on Instagram. If you

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want to get to know me better, go there first and maybe check out the blog. And if you still think I'm crazy, check out the book. But you can find me. That's one wonderful thing about the world of the web now is everything is so transparent. !

Neely: Yeah. !Brad: Look and see to find. !Neely: Yeah. This is fun to get to know you a little bit more in person. I

appreciate you talking to me about all this. !Brad: That was very fun. Thanks for having me. !Neely: Yeah. All right. Well, enjoy the rest of your day. !Brad: You too. See you, Neely. !Neely: Thanks. ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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