Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host. And I’m super excited to bring David Jockers, who is a doctor of natural medicine and runs one of the most popular natural health websites at drjockers.com, which has gotten over a million monthly visitors. And his work has been seen on popular media such as The Dr. Oz Show and Hallmark Home and Family.
Doctor Jockers is the author of the bestselling book; The Keto Metabolic Breakthrough and Fasting Transformation. He is a world renowned expert in the area of ketosis, fasting, inflammation, and functional nutrition. He’s also the host of the popular Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast. And he’s here to talk about enhancing your capacity for resilience. Welcome Doctor Jockers.
Dr. Jockers: Thank you so much, Jodi. Great to be on with you.
Jodi: So the first question I ask everyone is how do you define resilience?
Dr. Jockers: I think it’s really about adapting to the stressors that we’re under. So there’s this idea of, we all need to reduce stress. We need to try to minimize stress. And there’s a lot of good in that idea, but the reality is we’re all under stress. And stress is something that we all are going to be exposed to. And actually it’s beneficial that we actually can get stronger through stress. Exercise, for example, is a stress on the body, but we can get stronger and more resilient through it. So it’s really about handling stress in such a way that we adapt and we become stronger. And we become more capable human beings through the stressors that we’re being faced with.
Jodi: That’s exactly true. Stress can boost our resilience. And you do an amazing job of talking about diet protocols and diet approaches that help build resilience. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Dr. Jockers: Yeah, for sure. Well, I think that in our society today, we have just this continual access to food, and this is something that our ancestors didn’t have access to. Didn’t have refrigerators. Didn’t have pantries. There were a lot of times where we had food scarcity and there just wasn’t a lot of access to food. And so our ancestors weren’t eating five, six meals a day. They were eating the kind of calories that we’re eating on a regular basis. And so when food was plentiful, they ate a lot. And when it wasn’t, they didn’t eat as much.
And so today’s day and age, of course, again, we’re eating all the time and that’s a chronic stressor on our system. And what ends up happening is we end up with high blood sugar, insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, because again, we’re constantly feeding our system. And actually fasting or taking time away from meals, allows our blood sugar to drop, our insulin levels to go down, our bodies start burning fat for fuel. And we also start reducing inflammation.
We know that when insulin is high, and insulin’s job is to take the sugar out of the bloodstream, put it in the cells. And it’s very important that it does that. However, when it’s high, when it’s elevated for a long period of time, it also activates more inflammation in our system. And so when the inflammation goes down, then we start to feel better. And also we start to activate cellular repair processes where within ourselves, we have this process of autophagy, which is basically where we go in and we break down the different organelles, like the mitochondria, the areas that are damaged. We’ll take out the damaged mitochondria, we’ll break it down, get the raw materials and we’ll utilize the raw materials to produce new, healthy, stronger, more stress resilient mitochondria.
And so we’re literally reshaping and repairing ourselves from the inside out. This only happens when we have periods with very low insulin. And so we need periods of time without food in order to allow that to happen. And that’s a practice called intermittent fasting. Something I’m really passionate about, I think it really brings a lot of resilience to our body.
Jodi: Yeah, that’s great. And I love that you touched on the energy hormones like insulin and how basically resilience is energy. And the hormones that fuel energy or insulin, cortisol, some of the thyroid hormones. And what you’re really talking about is finding a way to help them work to the best of their ability. Can you elaborate on that a little bit and how to use the feast famine cycle to burn fat?
Dr. Jockers: For sure. So insulin is a super key hormone. It gets a bad rap, but it’s really important. Because when sugar is elevated in our bloodstream, we know that the sugar molecules themselves will bind to proteins and create sticky proteins. We call those advanced glycation end products or AGEs. And so if you’re out there listening, something says, “AGE” that means age, ages. And they do accelerate the aging process. They’re like shrapnel going through our bloodstream. They disrupt our endothelial lining, our blood vessels, our kidneys, our nerves. And so insulin helps prevent against that.
So it helps get the sugar into the cells and into our fat cells. We can utilize it either as storage or as an energy source. So really, really important but again, the problem is when insulin is too high, then we have major issues. But if we are not activating enough insulin, for example, let’s say we are just doing too much fasting. Or we just don’t have access to a whole lot of foods so we’re under eating for a long period of time. Insulin is also very important for activating active thyroid hormone production. So converts inactive thyroid hormone, which is T4 into active T3.
So our metabolism itself will go down if we’re not stocking up just enough insulin.Insulin is too low. It also helps to reduce sex hormone binding globulin so we have more active estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, all of our sex hormones. So if somebody is doing a low carb diet and particularly a lower calorie, low carb diet, or doing too much fasting, they can end up with their hair falling out with lower energy, with fatigue, with dry skin, constipation. A lot of these types of issues that are associated with low thyroid, low sex hormone production. So this is where the idea of feast famine comes in, where we want to keep insulin down for a good portion of the day.
But we also want times where insulin is elevated. So if we eat in, let’s say, one to three meals a day, depending on the individual, what they’re trying to accomplish. And then in those meals, possibly having one meal that’s just higher amount of calories and possibly a higher amount of carbohydrates to stimulate a little bit more insulin that can really help with activating again, free T3, which is your thyroid hormones, sex hormones. And that can really benefit the individual when it comes to maintaining muscle mass, energy levels, healthy mitochondria, good, healthy skin, hair, nails, healthy brain function, being able to think sharply and quickly.
So it’s a customized plan because for some people, they’re so insulin resistant, we need to really focus on getting insulin down. So we might do an extended fast, or a partial fast, or a ketogenic, or a lower calorie ketogenic diet for one to three months without really consuming anything that’s going to really spike or increase our insulin load in order to just get their cells more insulin sensitive. But then once we accomplish that, once their body’s now responding better to insulin, now, in a sense, we need to go through periods of time where we’re increasing insulin and then also keeping it down. And that’s that feast famine cycle.
Jodi: I love that. You’ve said so many brilliant things that I want to unpack. But before we get into when to eat and how to eat and what to eat, I’d love to talk a little bit more about insulin resistance and how high cortisol impacts insulin. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Dr. Jockers: Yeah. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid. Meaning that its main function is to actually increase circulating blood glucose. And the reason for that is, when our body is in fight or flight, so cortisol is considered a stress hormone. And so with our autonomic or automatic nervous system, we have two major modes. We have fight or flight or we have rest and digest. And so when we are going into fight or flight, cortisol is elevated. It gets sugar increasing in our blood stream so that way we have immediate fuel.
Sugar as a fuel source is advantageous from the perspective that we don’t need oxygen to break it down. So we can break down sugar as a fuel source and we can breakdown fat as a fuel source. So fat is very energy dense. We can produce a lot of energy, a lot less metabolic waste. Sugar is more of a dirty fuel. We produce a lot of metabolic waste when we break it down. The problem is, with fat, it takes longer to metabolize it and we need oxygen. So if we need quick fuel, and we may be in a position where we don’t have enough oxygen, for example, fight or flight, again, if we’re running or fighting, we need to produce a lot of energy and we’re not going to have enough oxygen. So we need to be good at burning sugar for that.
So the body cortisol helps prime the system and get the blood glucose elevated so we’re ready to work. We’re ready to run. We’re ready to fight. We’re ready to do something stressful and we’ve got the energy source available. The problem is when cortisol is elevated and then we don’t work. We’re sitting in a chair or we’re sleeping, or something along those lines. Now, we have elevated blood glucose, but we’re not actually utilizing it in our skeletal muscles. So again, now that blood glucose is up, so insulin is going to come out.
So if the body senses, “We’re not using the sugar, we got to clear it from the bloodstream.” Now, insulin comes out, starts pulling the sugar, puts it into the cells.
And if our neuro-endocrine system is not working very well, it can actually overshoot and we produce too much insulin, pull the sugar down too low. And now we get another increase in cortisol because when we have low blood sugar that is a big problem. Our brain isn’t able to produce enough energy. So now we end up with hypoglycemia. We’ve probably all experiences where we’re irritable or hungry. We’re hungry and angry at the same time. We may have nausea. We may have headaches. We may have anxiety, heart palpitations, things like that.
That’s reactive hypoglycemia where basically, we had a shoot of cortisol and then insulin came out, took down the blood sugar and now we’re too low in blood sugar. And so now we’re producing more stress hormones to get the sugar back up, but our body, it’s struggling to be balanced and stable. And blood sugar stability is incredibly critical when it comes to your energy production, your mental health. So your mood, your memory, your ability to do sharply and quickly.
And so cortisol and insulin, they’re supposed to play a really healthy dynamic game together and really complement each other. But if our neuro-endocrine system is not working in balance and we’re getting too much cortisol at the wrong periods of time and too much insulin, then it can be a really tricky rollercoaster, the blood sugar rollercoaster.Which can cause a lot of cravings, overeating, bingeing, headaches. All these different symptoms I talked about; anger, irritability, depression, anxiety, heart palpitations. A lot of unwanted issues can occur with this.
Jodi: I love how you explain things. Someone once told me that they actually have an antagonistic relationship. The cortisol’s trying to get sugar into the blood and insulin’s trying to pull it out. So cortisol overrides insulin, which is why you wind up with high blood sugar when you’re stressed. Do you think that’s accurate?
Dr. Jockers: Yeah, it is exactly. So that’s exactly what happens. However, again, if the stress continues, insulin’s going to still come out at some point or our cells are going to develop more cortisol resistance where they’re not going to respond to it. So a lot of people with high stress deal with hypoglycemia a lot. And they can’t go long periods of time without food because again, they have this neuroendocrine dysfunction where they’re not getting a good balance there between cortisol and insulin.
Jodi: It’s like they’re running out of gas every hour.
Dr. Jockers: That’s right.
Jodi: Which is why I love your reset. Let’s talk a little bit about, we need energy for resilience. We need energy for brain function. We’re on this blood sugar roller coaster. Talk to us about how the combination of keto and fasting can help us literally reboot our system.
Dr. Jockers: For sure. Well, probably the number one issue when it comes to our health today in first world countries like the United States is insulin resistance. Meaning that we’re struggling with our cells, we’re just not able to respond to insulin or we have chronically high insulin levels. And so again, this is from eating a lot of high carbohydrate foods and eating often throughout the day.
In fact, for a long time, like in the 90s, it was really big. It was this idea of low fat everything. And so if you take out the fat, you’re typically replacing it with carbs and starches and sugars. And you’re eating often. It’s eating five, six, seven times a day. And so when we do that, we’re constantly spiking insulin. And over time our cells become less responsive to the insulin. So a ketogenic diet basically is a way of eating that keeps insulin very low.
So there are certain foods that spike insulin that’s going to typically be your starches and your sugars, your breads, your pastas. Anything with sugar in it is going to spike your insulin levels, cause a really big high increase in them. Whereas healthy fats and proteins, things like, for example, avocados, olive oil, butter, grass fed meats, wild caught fish. Things like that along with your cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, different things like that. Those things you get very little insulin response when you consume them.
And so by eating foods that have a lower insulin impact, it allows us to reduce the overall amount of insulin that we’re releasing. And over time our cells become more sensitive to insulin. So they’re going to listen to the message, so we don’t need to produce as much. When we produce less insulin, we’re able to repair our body more effectively, reduce inflammation more effectively, keep our blood sugar more stable and burn fat for fuel.
And so that’s really the goal of the ketogenic diet, is to turn our body from a sugar burner, into a fat burner to improve insulin sensitivity. And the reason why we call it a ketogenetic diet is because we produce ketones. So as I said earlier, we can burn sugar for fuel and we could burn fat. Now, one area, our brain, it’s really hard to get fatty acids across the blood brain barrier because they’re large molecules. So our liver actually creates ketones, which are smaller molecules than fatty acids and they’re water soluble, and they can easily cross into the blood brain barrier.
So we used to think our brain could only run off of sugar, but we know today that it can actually run very effectively off of these ketones, in fact, it loves ketones. And when ketones are elevated in our bloodstream, which only happens when we have low insulin levels, which only happens naturally, endogenous production of ketones. We can also take supplements that increase ketone levels. And we can have high ketones with high insulin in the case of somebody with really bad Type 2 diabetes or in the case of somebody supplementing with exogenous ketones.
However, that’s very, very rare. And so for endogenous production, we’re going to have a low insulin, ketones are going to be elevated. And when the brain senses that ketones are elevated in your bloodstream, it actually shuts down overall inflammation in the brain. We have this inflammatory pathway called the neuro-inflammazone. And it amplifies inflammation throughout our brain. And so it’s like, instead of one police officer chasing one criminal, it’s like the entire alarm going off for the city saying, “Okay, all the police officers run out.” And in a sense they’re keeping order. And so it’s the same thing when it’s happening in our brain. When the inflammazone is activated, it’s basically just massive chaos, massive amounts of inflammation that’s taking place.
So it’s like an alarm going off. That’s because the brain, when we have high blood sugar or high insulin levels, the body is actually concerned that there’s some sort of infection that’s taking place. And we know that systemic infections have killed more people throughout the history of mankind than anything else. And so the brain’s amplifying inflammation for prevent against an infection from getting into the nervous system, creating something like meningitis and killing us quickly.
So when ketones now come in there, the brain says, “We must be in an environment where we’re working on healing and repair, and we’re not at risk for an infection killing us.” So it shuts down the neuro-inflammazone. So we get significant reduction in inflammation in our brain. Now, our brain cells are able to heal. We have mitochondria, tons of mitochondria. Our brain is super dense. All the neuronal cells super dense in mitochondria, when the ketones are elevated, we’re able to start to repair those mitochondria. And over time, just from producing energy, all of our mitochondria become damaged brain cells.
There’s roughly about 10,000 mitochondria per cell. So within our eye and our brain, some of the most dense areas when it comes to mitochondria. Your typical muscle cells has as about 1,000 mitochondria per cell. Your heart has about 5,000 mitochondria per cell. Your brain has 10,000 per cell. And so we’ve got shut down inflammation, get insulin down, get the ketones across. And now we start to repair those mitochondria. Ketones have been shown to increase something called mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the formation of new, healthy, stress resilient mitochondria. And also at the same time, mitochondrial autophagy, where we call it mitophagy where we break down the damaged mitochondria, and we actually turn them into newer, healthier, more stress resilient mitochondria.
So not only do we get more mitochondria, but we also take the bad mitochondria and turn them into good mitochondria so we become more stress resilient. Really, when it comes down to resilience with our mood, our emotions, our ability to think sharply and quickly, it’s really going to have to do with how healthier mitochondria are. And so when we can get the ketones elevated, it’s going to give us the best chance to prime our brain cells with really healthy mitochondria. So we can respond to stress more effectively.
Jodi: That is the best explanation I’ve ever heard on how ketosis heals the brain. Thank you for that. That was amazing. Now, I know you’ve obviously written two books on how to implement this, but just in terms of people that are listening that are like, “My gosh, this is the missing link.” Go out and buy David’s two books. And then if you can just help guide people through. We talked about resilience is really how do you execute? Where do you start? Like people that are listening, they’re like, “My gosh, you’re my missing link. How do I get started?”
Dr. Jockers: So when it comes to nutrition, what I’d recommend is basically stop snacking and eat three meals a day and go at least 12 hours between your very last meal of the day and your first meal the next day. So if you’ve finished dinner at 7:00 PM, you don’t eat again until 7:00 AM. The next morning, you can drink water, herbal tea, black coffee in that period of time. But nothing with calories and then eat three meals a day. And when you eat, really try to prioritize protein. So have some good quality protein. It could be organic pasture raised eggs.
The three basic changes when it comes to food quality that I recommend are minimizing grains, sugars, and starches. So we minimize those. We get rid of bad fats. It’s going to be our corn oil, soybeans oil, safflower oil, cotton seed oil, peanut oil, canola oil. These are all refined vegetable oils that promote inflammation. And instead we really focus on healthy fats. It’s going to be your olive oil, avocados, avocado oil, coconut oil, coconut milk, grass fed butter, grass fed tallow. Those are all great sources. Eggs are great sources of healthy fat. Nuts and seeds you can do. So we’re doing that.
And then we’re changing the quality of our meats. We’re getting rid of processed conventional meat. And instead we’re trying to consume grass fed organic pasture raised animal products or wild-caught seafood. And so we’re making those changes and then we’re eating three meals a day. So for breakfast you might have eggs and avocado. Or a smoothie with maybe a little bit of blueberries in there, some coconut milk and maybe half an avocado or an avocado, which makes it a little bit thicker and provides more healthy fats.
And then some good protein powder, good quality protein powder. So smoothie or eggs with avocado or something like that, or leftovers from dinner. And we’ll talk about dinner in a second. Lunch might be like a big salad with some chicken, some olive oil on it. Maybe some avocado or olives like black olives on there. So you have the healthy fats. And then maybe a little bit of dark chocolate after lunch. Unsweetened dark chocolate, or minimally sweetened. Try to get the highest amount of dark chocolate, like 88%, 90% dark chocolate. Minimal amount of sugar in there.
Jodi: People are going to ask why, why the chocolate?
Dr. Jockers: Well, you don’t have to do the chocolate, but the chocolate has healthy fats. So you’ve got fats in there. If you just get the chocolate without added sugar in it. Chocolate also actually is very good for circulations. It actually has compounds in there, polyphenols are good for your gut. And it has things like theobromine in there that help improve circulation. And for a lot of people, it gives them a little bit more energy in the afternoon because it has a small amount of caffeine to give you a little bit of energy.
And also it helps stimulate dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, which make you feel good just in general. So we all enjoy a little bit of chocolate. So you have that.
And then for dinner, you can have wild caught salmon steak, grass-fed steak, whatever healthy quality meat that you want. Coconut and butter or coconut oil. And then you have vegetables. You might have steamed broccoli or a big salad with some olive oil on it. Steamed broccoli with melted grass-fed butter and olive oil on it, and maybe some garlic salt or something like that. So you’re consuming non starchy vegetables as much as you want with healthy fats added to them. So sort of really good quality protein and a good, good quality serving of that. Whether it’s wild caught salmon, grass-fed beef, pasture raised poultry, something along those lines.
So that’s pretty much what you’re doing with your three meals. And then you’re hydrating well in between meals. And then what you try to do as you do that for a week or two. And then what you try to do there from there is basically condense your eating window. So if you’re doing a 12, maybe a 14 hour eating window where you’re, I’m sorry, 12 to 14 hour fasting window where you’re maybe finishing dinner at 7:00 PM and then waiting until 7:00 AM or maybe 8:00 AM the next day to eat breakfast, you might try to push out your breakfast till 10 or 11:00 AM, or maybe even to 12.
And now you’re eating what we call time restricted feeding, where we’re eating two to three meals in a, let’s say eight hour eating window, for example. And that’s going to give you more time to suppress insulin while you’re fasting to get those autophagy benefits where your body starts to break down those damaged proteins and rebuild. And it’s going to stimulate the production of fat burning. And in particular, the production of ketones. Once we start getting into that 16 hour range where we’re fasting for 16 hours, our body starts really ramping up fat burning, producing more ketones, and then you can experiment.
So from there, you can experiment where you can possibly do a 24 hour fast once a week. And that in fact, is something I highly recommend is doing something like a 20 to 24 hour fast, one time a week to really ramp up intracellular healing, this autophagy. But we’re going like for example, lunch to lunch or dinner to dinner one day a week.
Now, for some individuals, if you’re very lean already, and you’re very active. And particularly for females if you’re in your menstrual cycle, you’re very lean. You’re very active and you live a stressful life. Maybe you’re a mom or you’ve got a career and you’re already lean. It may not be good to do a longer intermittent fast, like a 16 hour fast every day. You may not feel great with that. So you might do it every other day, or you might just do it two days a week on non-consecutive days.We call that crescendo fasting.
So we have to realize is that intermittent fasting, just like eating every three hours is stressful, it’s actually stressful on your body because of this insulin overload. Well, fasting is also a stressor. It’s just a different type of stressor. And if your system is already overwhelmed by stress, or if you’re a menstruating female, and you go under a certain threshold with a body fat and your body senses, “Okay, I don’t have enough nutrients to be very fertile right now,” there could be some interesting things that happened with your hormones. There may be a reduction in your overall estrogen and progesterone levels.
And therefore you may miss a cycle. You may have more worsening menstrual symptoms, may start losing your hair, just not feeling good. So you have to really customize it because for a menstruating female, they need to have their body fat at a certain level for the fertility signals to kick in and be able to have good healthy cycles and really feel great throughout their entire cycle.
So fat fasting can be extraordinarily helpful for a woman to optimize her health and to optimize her menstrual cycle. But she just needs to be careful and make sure she’s not doing too much of that along with layering it with a whole bunch of other stressors like exercise, having young children, not sleeping great, different things like that.So you just have to be careful there. I talk about that a lot in my books and give strategies on how to deal with that.
Just another caveat to deal with but ultimately, we’ll start small 12 to 14 hour fast, bump it up to 16 hour fast. We may even experiment with fasted exercise as well, where you exercise at the end of your fast. So if your goal is to do, let’s say a 16 hour fast, you exercise at hour 15, get a good workout in and then if you want to shower you can shower but then you break your fast roughly within 30 minutes or so of finishing your workout. So you’re working out in a fully fasted state and then breaking your fast after the workout.
And that really challenges your mitochondria, really challenges your body to become very metabolically flexible because you want to be good at burning fat. If you’re good at fasting, fasting for 16 hours is pretty easy or 18 hours is pretty easy. It means that your body is good at breaking down fat, but at the same time we also want your body in a glycogen depleted state, still being good at breaking down whatever glycogen or stored sugar we have left.
So when we fast for 16 or 18 hours, we’re going to break down some of our stored sugar, not all of it, our body’s still going to keep a good amount of it. But we’re going to break down a certain amount and then we’re going to start breaking down body fat when we add in exercise at the end.Particularly high intensity exercise. And you might start small by just taking a walk or something like that and condition your body, but we want to get it to where you’re able to do strength training, maybe sprints, some sort of high intensity training.
Now, that really challenges your body to dive into those glycogen stores of stored sugar, be able to utilize that for energy. And you’re also going to burning fat during that period of time as well. And then that’s going to help your body actually store more glycogen. You’re going to get higher glycogen storage and better fat burning when you’re not working out. Because your body says, “Okay, I never know when we’re going to do this workout in a fasted state. So I need to prioritize as much glycogen as I can. And when I’m not exercising, I’m just going to burn fat because I don’t want to dip into the glycogen. I don’t want to dip into the stored sugar.” So it really helps store metabolic flexibility, our mitochondrial health and our overall level of resilience.
Jodi: That is so helpful. So actionable. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you think would be helpful for cellular resilience?
Dr. Jockers: When it comes to fasting and keto, I think those are great strategies, fasted exercise. For some people, doing a partial fast or an extended fast also can be an incredibly helpful process where you do like a three to five day fast, and you may do it with just water or you may do it for example, there’s something called the fasting mimicking diet. There’s also programs out there where you do like bone broth or green juice for three or five days. And you’re consuming a lot less calories.
And for somebody that has high levels of inflammation, they’re very overweight, this can be an incredibly helpful kick start for them. Or if they hit a plateau can really help them get over a plateau and move to the next level. And so when we do something like that, some sort of an extended fast, we really ramp up autophagy. We take it to a whole another level. And so we’re getting rid of these dysfunctional cellular organelles and literally rebuilding our mitochondria from the inside out. And so if somebody has an extreme auto immune condition, diabetes, different issues like that, as long as they’re doing it and doing it responsibly and talking to their doctor or their functional health coach and being advised properly through this, it can be extraordinarily helpful.
Jodi: Wonderful. Well, can you share where people can continue to work with you, learn more from you?
Dr. Jockers: Yeah. The best place to reach me is drjockers.com. I’m also on YouTube, my podcast; The functional Nutrition Podcast. And I’m also on social media, Facebook and Instagram
Jodi: And I’m guessing that the fasting transformation details more about where to start.
Dr. Jockers: Yeah, exactly. So my two books The Keto Metabolic Breakthrough it really gives you a strategy for how to get into ketosis. Really focused on that. And then how to cycle in and out of ketosis using these famine cycling. And in The Fasting Transformation is everything you could ever possibly want to know are research-based approaches to doing intermittent fasting, partial fasting, and extended fasting.
Jodi: Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for your time and all of this amazing information.
Dr. Jockers: Thanks again, Jodi. I appreciate you. And I’m looking forward to this summit. I think it’s powerful information that’s going to change a lot of lives.
Jodi: Thank you.
