Show Notes

• Definitions of Fasting:
• • Common Definition - abstinence from all or some kinds of food and drinks.
  • Physiological Definition - switching from external glucose for energy to burning stored fatty acids and ketones as main source of fuel.
  • Cellular Definition - absence of triggers of nutrient sensing pathways to stimulate stress resistance.

• Not all fasting is the same: Less than or more than 48 hours.

• Benefits of Fasting Hour by Hour: Glucose levels fall, food has been metabolized, growth hormones increases, stored fat is used for energy, ketosis, glycogen stores is depleted. Good for weight loss and metabolic flexibility. By the 24th hour, autophagy starts. On the 5th day comes a complete immune reset.

• Fasting-Mimmicking Diet: When the body senses nutrients, it turns on different pathways. And if they’re on constantly, it leads to cellular aging and growth. But if they do get a total reset, it leads to stress resistance. FMD is feeding the body with just a minimal amount of nutrients that doesn’t beyond the threshold for reaching autophagy as if you’re doing a water fast.

• Autophagy is a way of the body to “clean the house” or innate recycling.

• Fasting with Food - ProLon (FMD): Fasting State - Autophagy - Renewal. The process allows the body to mimic the fasting process and get its benefits—healthy aging, weight loss, improved performance, increased mental clarity and energy.

• Always be mindful when breaking your fast: have a transition day.

• Top 12 Tips when on a Fast

1. Water, water, and more water. Stay hydrated.
2. Spice it up. Add lemon to your water or spices to your soup.
3. You can still enjoy your coffee—but only one small cup, without cream and sweetener.
4. Stay active. Light exercise.
5. Share with someone. Talk about it so you can have people to support you or hold you accountable.
6. Ommm. Meditate. Helps to keep your centered and focused.
7. Be productive.
8. Good night. Good sleep is one of the keys to health.
9. Coach yourself.
10. Give. Help others.
11. Fast with friends.
12. You can take it with you. Go out and enjoy the weather.

ProLon is not for people with allergy to nuts, oats, sesame. Do not fast if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, pediatric, malnourished or underweight, and experiencing symptoms or treatment for an active infection or risk of recurrent infection.

• Do’s and Don’ts
• • FMD is not designed to diagnose, treat or precent any disease states.
  • Consult your provider and continue your medications for treatment purposes.
  • Hydrate properly.
  • Expect mild fasting-associated complaints such as fatigue, headache, dizziness and difficulty concentration.
  • Avoid strenuous exercise and exposure to high or low temperature environments.

Show Notes 

How habits form: As human beings, we develop our neurobiology—which also starts the development of our identity—including good and bad habits. As we evolve, creatures with nervous systems developed a learning process called positive and negative reinforcements. We learn to do two things—to eat and not to be eaten. Our ancestors learned the basics to survive.

Default Mode Network: a network of brain regions discovered by Dr. Marc Raichle. When people think about themselves a lot, like regretting the things they did in the past or worrying about the future or crave, the Default Mode Network gets activated. It is a way for us to survive. Our negativity bias, and confirmation bias help us survive.

There's an anatomical connection between the conceptual sense of self and the experiential sense of self. The experiential part of the default mode network is anatomically connected to the hippocampus so there are memory connections. We attribute memories to strong emotional experiences like pain. 

Seeking comfort and avoiding pain is in our subconscious. Overtime, it is who we are becoming. 95-98 percent of life is actual habits, and it's very adaptive. As we develop habits, it frees up our brain from relearning things, giving our brain the energy to learn new things. 

Habits are not only behavior, but also personality. People can develop anxiety or worry as habits. 

The thinking brain is not nearly as strong as our feeling body. We feel cravings and urges. An emotional state like anxiety is perpetuated through habitual mind states. Feeling of anxiety is not the habit itself, but anxiety can trigger worry thinking, which is a mental behavior.

People don't usually know that they have a certain mental habit. If they don't work with it as a habit, they're never gonna get out of it.  Some people benefit from medication but everybody can benefit from learning how their mind works and working with their minds.

Awareness and mindfulness vs Negative Loop of Anxiety: Fear mechanism drives our fight or flight response. Anxiety is fear about the future. Worrying about the future makes thinking and planning go offline. One way to work with anxiety is from a mechanistic perspective.

Target habitual behavior. Habit change is all about reward value. If you want to change behavior, you have to change the reward value. Pay attention to habits we want to change. Know its reward value and make a better offer and alternative.

Be the master of your habits: 1. Map out the habit loops. 2. Pay attention to what results are not very rewarding, drip the reward value. 3. Bigger better offers we can compare. 

Apps for your habits:

-unwinding anxiety app

-eat right now app

-craving to quit app

Psychedelics may help quiet down the Default Mode Network and might have some therapeutic potential for anxiety and depression. 

Default Mode Network is a marker for flow. 

The general concept is expansion versus contraction. Eperiment on things that make us feel the expansions or contractions: meditation, breath work, walking, hiking.

Show Notes

• Heart attack remains to be the number one killer around the globe.

• Precision diagnostics: Advance technologies such as the new type of CT Scan that uses Artificial Intelligence to look for vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries, full body MRI, gut scanning, genome scanning, whole genome sequencing, and epigenetic testing.

• Techniques and therapies:
• • Muscle release therapy is similar to fascia stretching, trying to unwind muscle fascia, break up scarred tissues, and muscular lesion, like little knots that happen in injuries due to overuse, bringing them to a state where they should be. 
  • Cupping therapy, scraping and/or gua sha - decompressing muscle tissues so blood flows well, bringing nutrients and oxygen, promoting healing. It has anti-inflammatory and antioxidative effects.
  • Laser therapy - good for reducing or solving pain and promoting healing.
  • Shock wave therapy (using acoustic sound waves) breaking up calcification in muscular and skeletal muscles; used a lot for shoulders, elbows, and knees tendonitis; bringing in an anti-inflammatory response; reaches deeper than laser therapy.
  • Ultrasound-guided regenerative procedures

• Good blood flow increases lymph flow, promoting better immune system and detoxification.

• Regenerative medicine using tools that promote healing:
• • Platelet-rich plasma or PRP from blood extracted from the patient spun down to produce plasma that contains growth factors that support healing.
  • Use of exosomes which are packets of inflammation that stem cells would have when actually secreting will start healing and regenerative response.
  • Cell spray like placenta cells that has a capability that allows regeneration.

• How Chiropractic fits in longevity: By helping athletes recover faster from injuries and pain, they can continue with their training, and daily exercise routines without pain right away. It loosens up the body to be able to move and do things properly.

• How the musculoskeletal systems keep in resonance with the nervous system: If we are stressed out, we put our body in a contracted state. All the systems in our body are controlled by our nervous system, the nerves, our muscles, our digestive system, etc. Every specific segment in the body is controlled by the nerves, By doing the adjustments you can down-regulate the nervous system and take you to your sympathetic—your fight-flight state, to a parasympathetic state, rest state, just by feeling relaxed state.

Shownotes

• As a radiologist, I know what those diseases looked like in the body. I was at the top of my game, but underneath the white coat, I was diabetic, had high blood pressure and I was on prescription medications. I didn't like the man I had become and how I am as a doctor giving medical advice, telling people to be healthy when I'm walking chronic disease statistics myself.

• Growing up from a refugee camp, as a striving immigrant was really something. There's certainly some trauma that I picked up too, because there's a lot of energy. Those experiences really shaped me. 

• Reclaiming my health = breaking the facade: When your body's going through stress, like when you're in that mode of chasing, you don't feel those feelings of true gratitude. It was really tapping into who I truly am as a person–acknowledging, accepting, and loving who that person is. And then diving deep into nutrition, epigenetics and what it really means to be healthy.

• Small adjustments to nutrition = huge shifts. Took the personal development route to understand myself and understand the emotional states I was in. The emotions that we feel every day actually dictate our biology. The spiritual side and community side also influence the biochemical changes that happen in our body.

• Chronic diseases, Performance and Longevity: It's all very related. It all boils down to the state of our cells—they work together through energy to form tissues, tissues work together through energy to form organs, organs work together in organ systems. And then they make up who we are. So if we want longevity, peak performance, and optimal health, we want all our systems to be optimal.

• Our state has less to do with our DNA, but actually on how the DNA responds to its cellular environment. The bioenergetic state is made up of the things that you feed your cells.

• # 1 BioEnergetic Element: Sleep is so important because it controls your circadian rhythm, which is really the ebb and flow of how your body responds. Get some sunshine, exercise, meditate; get rid of blue lights Good sleep routine and environment, journaling.

• YOU are your best medicine: Stepping into yourself is a great starting point to reverse chronic diseases or conditions.

• Emotional States and Health: Negative emotional states drive up the inflammatory response in our body. But as you cultivate positive emotions and start to feel better, you're gonna start to think better, seeing things from a different lens. Positive emotional states are actually antiaging.

• Dr. V’s favorite hacks to drive away negative emotions: Pause. Breathe very slowly. Gaze softly. Hero’s pose.

• Bioenergetic State Framework: Our DNA is not a fixed thing. It's how these genes are turned on and turned off on a moment to moment basis that determines how a cell behaves. The DNA is constantly listening and interacting with the environment that's around it—the bioenergetic state. 

• Changing habits and routines: HERO Prescription. Hunger. Energy. Reclamation. Optimization.cg

• Optimization hacks: Ice cold bath, intermittent fasting.

• Finding your Why: Sharing us with other people and the gifts of the struggle that we have been through and have overcome is our purpose—all the things that bring us joy. Our biology is really gifting us with abundant health in peak performance. When we know who we are, then we get to serve the brilliance of who we are with other people.

• Importance of EQ: When you're in those lower vibrational, emotional states of anger, fear, resentment, jealousy, worry, anxiety, your ability to think and communicate with another person is diminished.

Shownotes

• Insulin: The hormone that is increased when we sense blood sugar. It is released by the pancreas and latches onto our cells, allowing doors to open for glucose to enter into the cells.

• Insulin Resistance: When insulin signal is not working anymore. It is a metabolic problem associated with a lot of chronic diseases.

• Symptoms of uncontrolled blood sugar: Sugar craving. Getting hungry even after you've eaten. Getting fatigued or tired, particularly after meals. Panic attacks. Longterm symptoms: hormonal imbalances - acne, a polycystic ovarian syndrome.

• Pathophysiology of high blood sugar symptoms: Make proteins sticky and ineffective and tend to actually bind to receptors. Elevated blood sugars start to inhibit your mitochondria, and increases the oxidative stress in your body. Mitochondrial dysfunction lead to cellular dysfunction.

• Hacks to control your blood sugar levels:

1 - Watch the type of foods that you eat. The simple the sugars (fructose, pure sugars, starches), the faster it raises your blood sugar levels. Hidden sugars like those that end with O (sucrose, lactose).

2 - Practice fasting. Give your pancreas a rest. When you're fasting, you’re actually using your stored body fat to be converted to energy (called metabolic flexibility).

3 - Switch the order of your food intake. Start with fiber (vegetables). Fiber coats your stomach and slow down nutrient absorption. Then proteins. Lastly, eat your carbs.

4 - Take a spoonful or two of vinegar (ACV) to inhibit alpha amla and slow down the breaking down process of starch to glucose and to increase the absorption of glucose by the muscle to form glycogen.

5 - No naked carbs. Dress starch with fiber, fats or protein to decrease glucose spike.

6 - Use your muscles after you eat. Do 10-15 minutes of very light exercise after meals to decrease the glucose spike.

1. Sleep well. Get 7-9 hours of quality sleep to increase grelin in your body. 

• Monitor your blood sugar: Do it at right around the same time every day. Get your labs drawn as early in the morning as possible. Avoid strenuous physical activity the night before. Consider using a continuous glucose monitor.

Try ProLon’s Fast-Mimicking diet. Use THRIVESTATE as code to get 15% off.

Show Notes

• Happiness is the greatest success. It's the greatest wisdom. It's the reason we want wisdom. It's the reason we want love. No matter what you want, you really want this feeling that we call happiness. That is really a deep sense of content and fulfillment or peaceful aliveness. 

• Progress Paradox by George Easterbrook: Despite technological advancements that let people live a longer life, even higher quality of life, or even a healthier life, people were actually feeling less happy as a result of it. We probably struggle as much as we ever have to feel truly and genuinely connected to other people to ourselves. We experience a lot of cognitive overload.

• Our brain is literally wired for negativity and confirmation bias and a number of other biases that make survival much more likely. 50% of our happiness is attributable to genetics but it's changeable.

• Deviating from Happiness: Happiness is actually our natural state. Overthinking, overanalyzing, perfectionism can be great for business but terrible for your personal life and subjective wellbeing. It's terrible for happiness, peace and even self-love. 

• Recognize that divine discontent is pointing you to a better direction, in a direction that would make you happier in some way or the other.

• A much more likely outcome from even the most challenging or disruptive forms of adversity or even trauma is actually post-traumatic growth. Most people grow from adversity and challenges. They grow even when they don't wanna grow, even when they think they can't grow.

.• Adversity always causes us to stop, slow down and reprioritize. It also  weeds out relationships that are weak or not the healthiest and it strengthens the ones that are right. It helps us pay attention to gaining deeper wisdom around what our life is for, what's it about, and where true happiness lies and where it doesn't.

• Happiness does lead to health. Happy people are actually a lot more responsible with respect to health such as taking healthy behaviors.

• Happiness is not in the world. It's in you. It's not in the past, in the future; it's in the present and in the presence itself.

• Four big steps to cultivate innate happines: Our happiness journey is mostly about happy activities or happy actions. Create a list of things, places, activities that make you feel energized, inspired, alive, and encouraged. Reduce the time energy that you invest inunhealth unhealthy, toxic relationships and create some boundaries. Set happiness as your state of mind.  Entertain thoughts based on whether or not they're true and constructive. Don’t overthink.

• 32:19 Flow State: One way to describe happiness. In flow state, you're perfectly present and you are not living from the mind, but from a deeper place.

• How to cultivate the ‘being’: Just begin to notice when you're perfectly at peace or feeling happy how quiet your mind is. Practice micro meditation. Enjoy your breath.

• Most of us overlook the simple things. It's the simple things that are always most powerful and profound.

• Rob’s Best Medicine: Happiness. 

Why do people fast: Religion. For mental clarity and cognitive benefits. Sense of calmness.

Forms of Fasting: Intermittent fasting, Periodic fasting or cleanse.

Resting helps every cell in the body. Your digestion is like you sleeping your gut.

Fasting is so ingrained into the biology of every living organism. It is actually one of those miracles of life. Our bodies’ ability to adapt to the absence of calories helped us survive. 

Cellular stress-resistant mechanisms get activated through constant recycling, degradation of the least optimal parts during a fast and making new ones after the fast.

Autophagy, or self-eating, is a fundamental process for every cell in the body which makes for the mechanism of recycling. Its the cleanup process that improves the health and efficiency of a cell.

Fasting vs Low calorie diet: Low calorie diet does not trigger the fasting responses - just a mathematical manipulation of calories coming in and out. Fasting is a stress event that causes the cells to do that auto process and cell cleanup.

Longevity Pathways: Difficult discipline of recycling leads to expansion of stronger cells.

Fasting is really not about low calories but stress. When you're stressed, your stress hormone goes up fast but will maintain your muscle integrityand mass. What you're burning are the fats starting on your belly. Muscle strength is an important aspect of longevity.

Fasting and Inflammation: The body is using the fasting period to recalibrate and lower the level of stimulation onto the immune system. The down-regulation lets your body sense nutrients that somehow changes it in a totally different trajectory.

If you're not in the right health condition, prolonged water fasting could cause dehydration, low blood sugar and electrolyte imbalance. It's not a one size fits all. 

Things to consider when going for prolonged water fasting: Overall health condition. Age. BMI. Go gradually.

Fasting mimicking diet: If we're able to provide nutrients below the detection threshold of cells’ nutrient sensors, you can technically provide nutrients while achieving fat-driven weight loss. Sparing the muscle weight loss, we're able to achieve the spiritual and the emotional benefits of fasting.

Try ProLon by L-Nutra to reset your body: Get a special discount with coupon code: thrivestate from this link.

Dr. Hsu’s best medicine: Don't wait, start today.

Coding is something that happens to your experiences. The brain physically cannot handle all the information that it's assimilating at any one time. As you are growing and going through the experiences that you have in life, you're taking the experiences as they occur to you and fitting them into what you know about the world.

It's a simple awareness at the moment that you actually create your truth. 

Foundational learning. First, we are slowly learning through physical experiential living the cause and effect. The problem is when the effect is unpleasant and we're involved, we think we're the cause. Cause we don't have the capacity to see the big picture. Second, we learn right and wrong. When people make it clear that you did something that they don't like, you are left very clear that it sits outside of their right and wrong. 

Creating a thought pattern. Thought patterns that get confirmed create thoughts, internal beliefs and an internal belief will instantly switch on confirmation bias, activating your articular activating system. And you are just looking to confirm the truth that you think is an existence. So your whole biology now begins to work against you, to reconfirm to you a state that you think is true isn't necessarily.

Essential awareness:  Safety. As babies, we don't really understand if we're hungry or thirsty, we just understand a feeling that's uncomfortable. Being loved. Toddlers have a sense of whether they're loved or not. The brains of babies who are not affectionately nurtured grow differently to the brains of babies who get affection. Love and affection are crucial to the way the brain develops.

Your value doesn't change from the day you're born to the day you die. But what does change is your perception of it.

Your Path to Freedom: The level of success that you will have in the world directly correlates to the image you hold about yourself. The whole world is made up inside how you think it is so get rid of the ones that don't work for you and keep the ones that do.

If you want to remove a meaning, you must replace it with something else. It is your business to keep the channel open. 

Accessing your Flow State: Turn the noises off. You trust yourself more when the noise is turned off. You stop second guessing yourself the whole time. You get to listen. And when you listen, the body speaks because the mind and the body are working together the whole time.

People with cancer and have survived it usually have that epiphany awakening of their being. They have a deeper insight into life and their meaning to be here. We control this so much more than we believe we do.

The pain disappears when the mind is turned off, like when we sleep. But when the mind is back on, the pain comes back. You have to remember it consciously for the feelings to hit your body again. We know that the body holds pain and trauma, and that we consistently reconnect with that pain and trauma to remind ourselves why we are being the way we are.

Show Notes

• On cellular health: The theory of mitochondrial metabolism at the cellular level gained tractions in her practice. Poor cellular health, insulin resistance are common factors in many chronic disorders, metabolic disorders. It is generally common to many conditions affecting organ systems.

• The Wahls Protocol’s diet piece is here in a flash:
• • 9 cups vegetables
  • 3 cups greens
  • 3 cups cabbage family
  • 3 cups onion family
  • 3 cups mushroom vegetables
  • 3 cups deep pigmented vegetables/fruits like beets, berries, roots, and tubers
  • Remove sugar, gluten-containing grains, dairies, eggs.

• Best proteins are from fishes from the wilds. Liver meat and heart are fabulous superfoods.

• Time-restricted eating or fasting - 3 to 7 days of fasting infuses the body with new stem cells to keep you young and healthy.

• It takes efforts to change habits and extinguish harmful habits. If it can be linked to why it's important to us, it will drive us to be invested more to do the work. 

• Steps to Behavioral Change: Inspiration.Talk about the why's to go and change. Get people fired up in learning to do the work. Talk with the patient and his/her family to plan even small things that can be done realistically to achieve tangible successes.

• Study your biosensors. Hear what the body is saying about your health. Teach patients that pain is handy to sense what might be happening inside your body. Learn to  pinpoint what changes were made that triggered these biosensors to show symptoms. Learn from it or ignore it, then you can anticipate more cellular damage.

Longevity Vision Fund: Supports entrepreneurs and scientists who bring technology to the old world of medicine.

In fighting massive diseases like cancer, the goal is how to cut the cost while improving the efficacy of early diagnostics.

The Future of Longevity Medicine: 1. Longevity in a pill or life extension drug. 2. Organ regeneration and organ replacement. Part of regenerative medicine. 3. Genomic medicine. Gene editing or gene therapies.

The role of longevity and health is the role of change. It is difficult for individuals to change and become healthier because of long feedback cycles. Wearables like smartwatches, sleep, glucose monitors give you instant feedback, stimulate you everyday. It is data-driven and technology-based, it is more practical and easier to act on.