Fasting For Resilience & Cancer Prevention

What if the most powerful resilience practice costs nothing, fits any schedule, and turns your own cells into a repair squad? 

In today's episode we dive into fasting as a practical, evidence-informed way to boost resilience, support treatment, and create a body environment where cancer struggles to thrive. 

I share step-by-step strategies to help you start safely, build metabolic flexibility, and time longer fasts for deeper benefits.

Here's some of what we're covering:

• why fasting acts as a hormetic stress for longevity and resilience
• metabolic shifts that lower insulin, glucose, inflammation, and IGF-1
• autophagy and cellular cleanup that supports detox and repair
• immune regeneration and stronger white blood cell production
• differential stress resistance to protect healthy cells during treatment
• practical fasting tiers from 13 hours to 72 hours and beyond

There are really good reasons why fasting is my #1 tool to support cancer prevention and why I encourage everyone to give it a try.

If you want more guidance around fasting, join us inside The Healing Accelerator, our coaching program, where we will teach you all the ins and outs of fasting and help you personalize a plan so that you can start playing with it in a safe and effective way. Schedule a FREE strategy session to learn more!

As always, please help us spread the word by sharing, subscribing, & leaving a review. 

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Transcript

Why Fasting Is Dion’s Top Tool

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Hello and welcome back to the Ground and Root Podcast, where we are exploring the world of holistic and functional strategies to enhance your healing and help you stay cancer free. I am your host and holistic cancer dietitian, Dion Detraz, and we are continuing our month dedicated to building resilience in our body, mind, and spirit this year. Now, in last week's episode, we talked about how exercise, especially sprength training and high intensity interval training, can help you build resilience. In today's episode, we are going to talk about my absolute favorite of all time tool and why it is one of the first things we teach inside of our coaching program. And that is fasting. If you are not already a fan of fasting, I promise you by the time we finish this episode, you will be. And I will give you really easy places for you to get started. Even if you don't think you could ever possibly fast, you don't think you're a good candidate. I promise you there is a style of fasting that you 100% can do and start reaping the multitude of benefits that come from fasting. So we are going to talk about fasting in the sense of building resilience as a hormetic stress and how that helps with our longevity. But there are so many benefits to fasting that I also want to take a minute to just talk about that first. Because once I go through all the ways fasting impacts your body, you are going to understand why this is one of my favorite tools and why I literally teach every single person I work with how to fast because it's just that impactful. So let's get into it. Whether your goal is weight loss or better blood sugar management or lower inflammation or a stronger immune system and cancer prevention, or honestly, simply even just living a longer and healthier life, fasting is probably the best thing you could add to your regimen. It is one of the oldest therapies in medicine. Many renowned physicians throughout history, including Hippocrates, have recommended fasting as an important method of healing and prevention and helping the body to heal itself. Consider how the body naturally reacts when fighting an infection. As our internal heat rises to kill off the infection, our appetite naturally declines so that all of our energy can be used to support the immune system and to help us get better quicker. Historically, I know I mentioned this before in a previous episode as well, that humans have lived in environments with fluctuating food availability. Evolution has selected us to be able to withstand periods of starvation. If anything, fasting from time to time is a much more natural way of eating and being than having, you know, three to four meals every day with snacks in between. Adaptation to starvation diverts energy into other protective systems. This helps us minimize the damage that would reduce fitness by not having calories available. So this adaptation is actually what is providing many of the benefits to the body. So let's talk about what some of those benefits are. When you fast, human growth hormone levels go up, insulin levels go down. Your body cells also change the expression of genes. They initiate important cellular repair processes. And then, of course, they are also activating fasting, is also activating a hormetic stress response, which is helping our cells age slower, right? It makes our cells less complacent. It boosts our health by getting rid of less efficient cells while investing in stronger ones. And then, much like exercise, fasting literally benefits just about every system in our body, including the brain, the heart, the gut, the liver, the muscles, the immune system, et cetera, right? The list goes on and on. Now, specifically when it comes, though, to cancer recovery, cancer prevention, and metabolic health, which is a big piece to why it's a great anti-aging tool, is because of these benefits. When we fast, we lower blood sugar levels, we improve insulin sensitivity, also lowering insulin levels. We lower inflammation, right? We lower insulin-like growth factor one. We're basically changing the environment of the body to make it less hospitable to cancer cells. We're also initiating cellular repair. When fasted, this these repair processes get triggered. And this includes a really important process known as autophagy, where cells literally digest and remove old and dysfunctional proteins and cells that don't belong there anymore. This also includes targeting and removing viruses and pipe and parasites and other microbes from the body. So it's literally like our internal system to clean house. And it's important that we give the body the chance to do that every so often so it can get rid of things that don't belong there, including precancerous cells or cancer stem cells, things that could become problematic down the road. Now, another incredible benefit is really immunotherapy or immune regeneration. So not only does fasting help us remove these sort of weak and damaged cells, it also boosts stem cell production. So as soon as you start eating again, the stem cells form new, stronger white blood cells. And this is incredibly important because these cells are essentially your soldiers of the immune system, right? They are your surveillance system and they are critical in preventing cancer along with other illnesses and diseases. So, you know, if just one or two of those things weren't enough, that entire laundry list of benefits is really why it's so important for us to include some type of fasting regimen in our diets, in our plans, in our long-term strategies. Now, what if you're also still moving through cancer? What if you're actively receiving treatment? Well, fasting has also been documented to be incredibly helpful for cancer recovery and treatment support. This happens because of three very specific benefits that occur when we fast while we're also receiving traditional cancer treatments. So the first thing that I want to explain, because it is like kind of unbelievable magical benefit, is what is known as differential stress resistance, which basically means our natural cells, so I'm gonna say versus like our healthy cells versus cancer cells, okay? Our healthy cells have adapted, like I've already talked about. They have evolved to go through periods of starvation. The way it, the way our healthy cells manage that is that when there isn't food available, they slow down, right? Metabolically, they go quiet, they go dormant, they wait until there's food available again, they divert energy to more important systems so they hunker down more or less. Cancer cells typically do not have this same evolutionary response. They are, when they're fasted, they're just hungrier. They're looking for fuel, right? They're weak and vulnerable. So this is where it can get interesting. Because when we go into treatment fasted, our healthy cells are hunkered down, hibernating, slowed down, protected. The cancer cells are not. The cancer cells are weak and vulnerable and hungry and looking to take up fuel. So then the treatment comes in, the treatment can be more effective on the cancer cells, while less of the treatment gets taken up by your healthy cells. So it's really this win-win. This is this differential stress resistance. It's a win-win where it's targeting cancer cells more strongly while less toxicity is happening to your healthy cells. Pretty amazing. This is also why we bring in fasting elements into all of our treatment support plans with our clients, because it dramatically reduces the amount of side effects or symptoms from treatment because of this differential stress response, which is pretty incredible. It also helps lower inflammation and lower blood sugar, which can be byproducts of treatment itself. So it's helping to maintain a metabolic health that is going to make it harder for cancer to continue to grow or replicate or spread. Hopefully that makes sense. It's possible that we may do another episode just on the treatment support piece because it's so powerful, but it is definitely one of the primary tools we use inside of Ground and Root with all of our clients because it has such an impact. Improve treatment effectiveness with less side effects. Yes. Yes, sign me up. How do I do that? Now, the other ways fasting can be beneficial while we're moving through treatment. Like I mentioned, it can help lower inflammation, can help lower blood sugar. This is also going to impact some of the traditional side effects and symptoms that come from things like chemotherapy or radiation therapy. So again, it can in that through those mechanisms, it can also help minimize symptoms and side effects, which is great, right? Because by controlling these factors, you feel better and you also help the treatment work better. Now, there are different styles of fasting, and some that I encourage you to start with, particularly if you're brand new and you're like, I don't even know how I could do this. So I'm going to tell you four different ways. Okay. The first and the easiest place to start is with your overnight fast. And believe it or not, there's even been really good research documenting the benefit of even just that, even just your overnight fast. Fasting for at least 13 hours overnight has been shown to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence by up to 30%. That's huge, right? So the goal is to try to go 13 to 15 hours every night with at least three hours of not eating before bed. So you just really have to do the math, right? When do you eat dinner? When do you eat breakfast? When do you go to bed? And try to get at least a 13-hour window in there in order to get the some of these benefits, plus that three-hour window before bed, ideally where you're not eating, so that you're done digesting, so that when you head into sleep, your body can actually start doing repair processes instead of continuing to digest. Okay. So that would be number one. Number two, once you've been doing that and you've gotten used to it, because all of this is really about training your body to fast too. Believe it or not, fasting does get easier the longer you do it because you're teaching, you're teaching your body how to fast, how to become metabolically flexible, which means instead of only relying on glucose for energy, we can actually use fat for fuel, right? And as long as we have some fat stores available, we can continue to function pretty darn well, even when we're fasted. So once you've got the overnight fast happening most nights, then we could try going into an intermittent fast, which is now pushing it to that 16 or longer. Remember, I mentioned that earlier that at that 16-hour mark is really when the hormetic stress benefits begin to kick in. At the 17-hour mark is really when autophagy starts to kick in. And remember, autophagy is that cellular cleanup process, right? That cellular repair process that we want to take advantage of. So getting this like 16 to 18 hour window, even like a couple times a week, could be incredibly helpful at just ramping up some of those fasting benefits. Now, again, I may go into this deeper in a future episode because there is some research around how to time this best, particularly with circadian rhythm support, depending on where you are, if you're still menstruating, depending on where you are in your cycle. There's a lot of like little caveats here, but just as a general rule of thumb, getting that 16 to 18 hour window a couple times a week is gonna ramp up those benefits. Then we can go even longer, but again, we take it one step at a time. So your body gets adapted and it becomes easier to go further. With extended fasting, we can move up to 24 hours, which is great for helping to reset the gut microbiome and to initiate cellular repair processes in the gut, which often takes a hit from cancer treatment, right? So this can be another really good benefit at helping the gut repair and the microbiome rebalance. We can go up to 48 hours, which is gonna be a nice reset for our hormonal health, especially as it relates to our mood. And then ideally, at least a few times a year, we do a 72-hour or longer, which is what's gonna give us the best immune regeneration. So again, coming back, narrowing things back down to the immune system, our primary defense against cancer. This is why inside the healing accelerator, four times a year, so once a season, we move through an extended fast together. And that fast is typically a three to five day fast so that we get the most possible cellular cleanup happening as well as immune regeneration happening. Now, there are different ways you can move through those types of fasting. And again, I think I'll probably wait and talk about that more in a future episode. It can just be straight water only. It could be liquid only, non-caloric, liquid only, right? Or very minimal caloric. Or it could also be what is known as a fasty mimicking diet. And this is what we use inside of our coaching program when we teach people to do the three to five day. We start with a fasty mimicking diet that can help you get the benefits of the fast, but make it much easier to do because you're still having a little bit of food coming in. So yeah, I definitely think I will table that for a future episode because that could be an episode in and of itself of how to do that. This was first taught to us by Dr. Walter Longo and his research at USC around fasting and the fasting mimicking diet. So I'll share more about that in a future episode. And then, of course, we can also time a fast with treatment so that we can really maximize that differential stress response that I was explaining, where we write help protect healthy cells but make cancer cells more vulnerable. And that is going to require a little bit more personalization depending on, you know, what your treatment looks like, your state of health, what your weight is doing, all kinds of things. We help all of our clients inside of our coaching program personalize timed treatment fasts. So if that is something you are interested in, then please reach out. We can talk to you more about our coaching program and see if it's a good fit for you. And then we can help get you a really specific plan for adding fasting to your treatment plan. It is, it has thankfully been through research shown to be quite safe for people even moving through chemotherapy. But it is best to have a guide. It's best to not just do that on your own and make sure you have somebody supporting you with that. All right. So the best place to start with all of this, if I've convinced you, if you're like, yes, I definitely want to start getting some of these benefits, the hormetic benefits plus everything else, start with the overnight fast. Okay. See how much you're typically getting right now. See if you can at least match it 12-12, right? Like 12 hours of eating, 12 hours of fasting. Then push it up between 13 to 15 with that three-hour window before bed without food, and just get used to that. That is already giving you a lot of metabolic benefits. Okay. So hang out there until you feel ready to try to go longer. And then the next step would be to get in that intermittent fast, that 16 to 18 hour window, maybe once or twice a week. If you're already doing that and you've been doing that for a while and you feel really good when you're fasting, then you could push it farther. You could try a 24-hour fast once or twice a week, right? We could do a 48 or a 72 or longer. As your body becomes more adapted, it will get easier and easier to go longer. And even those of you, because I can already hear some of you thinking this, if you're still listening, because I may have already turned you off and you've already turned off the podcast. But even those of you who get low blood sugar and you're like, there is no way I am a good candidate for fasting, I really invite you to think again. I have seen over and over in the people that I've worked with that even those people who were really unsure, fasting ended up helping them because it teaches your body, like I said before, to become more metabolically flexible. And as soon as your body understands how to use other fuel sources efficiently, your blood sugar will stabilize. You will not get those highs and lows, right? You will have good energy even when you're not eating. So I want you to not be too closed-minded. If you think you're not a good candidate, it's quite possible that you just need to start with the overnight fast and then slowly start teaching your body to begin to use fat for fuel. All right. So, in summary, there are truly so many anti-cancer and anti-aging benefits to fasting, right? But here are really the top five reasons. I do it myself. I recommend it to everybody I work with and why I talk about it so passionately all the time. Number one is metabolic enhancement, right? We are changing the environment in your body so it's as makes it as hard as possible for cancer to grow. That means we're dropping blood sugar, we're dropping insulin, we're dropping insulin-like growth factor one, we're dropping inflammation, right? We're creating metabolic health in the body, which is also going to impact mitochondrial function, so many other things. That's number one. Number two is really the immune boost, right? It's helping to clean out things that don't belong there while also enhancing immune function so that our primary defense against cancer can be more functional, right? Can do its job, can be a better surveillance system. Number three is detoxification. Like I mentioned, it's clearing things out, it's cleaning house, it's getting rid of stuff that shouldn't be there. Number four is treatment enhancement. If you're still moving through cancer treatment, I truly believe this is one of the best tools, integrative tools that you can bring in to enhance your treatment experience. And then number five, it's building resilience in your body, right? It's helping create stronger cells, stronger genes, and ultimately helping your cells age slower. So it's also improving your longevity as well. I would love to hear from you. I would love to know if you're already a fan of fasting. If you've already been doing it for many years, if you're excited to give it a try, what type of fasting you're ready to go for, please share. If you want more guidance around fasting, please join us inside the Healing Accelerator, our coaching program. We will teach you all the ins and outs of fasting and we'll give you a personalized plan so that you can start playing with it in a really safe and effective way. And as always, if you enjoy the content we're covering here at the Ground and Root Podcast, please help us spread the word by sharing, subscribing. leaving a review. We really appreciate your support and helping this information get into the ears of as many people as possible. I wish you such a beautiful day. Happy fasting. I look forward to connecting with you again on next week's episode. Bye for now.