Episode 145 | Short Fasts vs. Prolonged Water Fasting for Cancer | Autophagy, Tumor Shrinkage & Emotional Healing

[00:00:00] Dr. Katie Deming: Stacking a bunch of short fasts will never do what one prolonged fast does for healing, and almost everyone gets this wrong.

[00:00:07] Dr. Katie Deming: Welcome to Born to Heal, the podcast helping people with cancer go beyond Western medicine to heal naturally through the ancient power of prolonged water fasting, so you can ditch the toxic protocols, take control of your health, and let your body do what it's designed to do: heal. I'm your host, Dr.

[00:00:27] Dr. Katie Deming: Katie Deming. Here's what you'll discover in today's [00:00:30] episode: why short fasts are genuinely good for you and exactly where their benefits stop, the second tier of healing almost no one has been told about and why you can't reach it in 72 hours, and finally, what happens around day eight of a fast that you simply cannot get any other way.

[00:00:49] Dr. Katie Deming: Let's dive in Okay, so let's talk about this. You know, a lot of people have decided that if a three-day fast is good, doing a three-day fast [00:01:00] often must be just as good as doing a long one. And the, the idea is that more frequent is going to give you the same benefit as doing just one long fast. And this feels logical.

[00:01:14] Dr. Katie Deming: It seems like it makes sense, and it also feels like if you've done some short fasts that, okay, I can just do– I can repeat this and get even more of a result from repeating the same thing. And i- this is especially tempting for those of yous that are [00:01:30] optimizers already doing all the right things and like, “Okay, I've got this into my schedule, so now let me just churn this out, and let me just do a bunch of short three-day fasts.”

[00:01:40] Dr. Katie Deming: What I want you to walk away from this episode today is understanding that short fasts are real and valuable, but there's a whole second tier of fasting that mo- most people have never been told about. And short fasts are good, so let me give you their due. Let's just start there and say, why is it good [00:02:00] to do the short fasts?

[00:02:00] Dr. Katie Deming: Because I lead one of those every month, and I, I love it. I actually love doing a three-day fast once a month myself. So these fasts are good to do a short 72-hour fast. They build metabolic flexibility. They train your body to get into ketosis more easily. They lower insulin. And if you use Thomas Seyfried's logic, you get a drop in the glucose, raise in your ketones.

[00:02:27] Dr. Katie Deming: You're putting recurring metabolic [00:02:30] pressure on the cancer cells, which depend heavily on glucose for their fuel. And then if you, you know, weave in Valter Longo's work, and research around fasting, showing that short repeated fasts also lower insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, a growth signaling factor tied both against aging and cancer, and also the differential stress model that Longo presents, showing that fasting protects healthy cells while making cancer [00:03:00] cells more vulnerable, especially alongside conventional therapy.

[00:03:04] Dr. Katie Deming: And his cancer studies actually used short cycles, one to three days repeated around chemotherapy. So this isn't nothing. Actually, short fasts are a real tool to use. But what I wanna talk about is why would you wanna go longer? Like, what is different about a longer fast that is not what you get in these shorter 72-hour fasts?

[00:03:28] Dr. Katie Deming: So If short fasts [00:03:30] do all that, w- why would you bother doing a prolonged fast? And the reason is, is because most people have never been told what is on the other side of a long fast, and what are the benefits that you get with a prolonged fast that you just simply can't get from shorter fasts. So I like to use this analogy.

[00:03:48] Dr. Katie Deming: I live in Portland, Oregon, or just outside of Portland, Oregon, and my family is in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it is a 10-hour drive to go from Portland [00:04:00] to San Francisco by car. Okay? A short fast is like driving from Portland to Eugene, Oregon, which is a couple hours away, and then turning around and going back home The drive from Portland to Eugene is a great drive.

[00:04:13] Dr. Katie Deming: You've covered real ground, but you came home. If you do that trip 10 times, you've driven a lot of miles, but you are nowhere closer to San Francisco than when you started, right? If you're doing these short trips from Portland to Eugene back and forth, back [00:04:30] and forth, you could even travel the same amount of mileage, but you haven't gotten any closer to your destination, which is in San Francisco.

[00:04:38] Dr. Katie Deming: Every time you break a fast, you don't just pause the trip, you drive all the way back home, and the clock resets to zero. So stacking shorter fast isn't a slow road to the destination, it's the same first leg over and over and over and never arriving at the destination. So but [00:05:00] what's happening? You know, this is the question I think that comes up for people that are like, “Okay, well, the short fast is not the same thing as a long fast.”

[00:05:05] Dr. Katie Deming: So what happens once you pass Eugene, once you get past, you know, the early phases of a fast? And so let me talk about the first week of a fast, and then we can go what comes even later than that. So in the first week, you're getting into sustained deep ketosis, not for a brief dip, but a state that your body settles into, right?

[00:05:25] Dr. Katie Deming: If you're going into a three-day fast, you're gonna get into ketosis, and you're gonna stay there for a [00:05:30] little bit. You also get some detoxification in the first 72 hou- two hours, but I would argue that most of the detoxification starts at about day four. Day four to day seven are big detox days in a prolonged fast.

[00:05:47] Dr. Katie Deming: And when you just get to 72 hours, you're barely scratching the surface of detoxification and the power that fasting has on detoxifying the body. The other thing that happens once you get [00:06:00] past 72 hours is the microbiome starts to shift, but it really hasn't made a big shift. So if you're looking to reset your microbiome and you're going 72 hours or even four days or five days, you're not necessarily getting that microbiome reset that you want.

[00:06:15] Dr. Katie Deming: You're just starting to get a shift there. So this first week is the labor of a fast. It is really sets the stage But the headlight event in my eye– in my mind as an oncologist hasn't happened yet. [00:06:30] And this is really actually when you get past the first week of fasting that is so powerful. And I wanna say that once you get past five days, it is really important that you are doing it in a supervised fashion and you have someone helping you.

[00:06:46] Dr. Katie Deming: I actually want to call out to this because I have, you know, fasters going all the time, and I have a group of fasters right now, and you never know what is going to come up. And I will just say, over this past [00:07:00] weekend, I had someone who was doing fine, and then all of a sudden, not fine, not doing fine, and really needs support and needs someone who knows what to do and how to really get into the refeeding aspect or portion of a fast in a safe manner.

[00:07:14] Dr. Katie Deming: And this person, if she had been on her own fasting, would've been in a really bad spot because the problem is you're weak, you're tired, you feel sick, and then you don't know what to do, and who are you gonna [00:07:30] call? So I just wanna say this, is that there, you know, a lot of people come to me and they're like, “Well, I'm just gonna stop eating because that's easy and I can do that, and I know how to do that.”

[00:07:39] Dr. Katie Deming: I'm like, “Absolutely, you definitely know how to do that.” But the question is, do you know what to do when something goes wrong or do you know how to refeed appropriately? Those are really big questions because refeeding syndrome is a real risk associated with fasting. It's the biggest risk. And so you can feel fine going through a fast, and then you get close to the refeeding, and this is where it gets really [00:08:00] tricky.

[00:08:00] Dr. Katie Deming: And this is where my client was having trouble and she sure was glad I could coach her through that. Anyway, that was a digression because I just, like so many people say this to me, like, “It's fine.

[00:08:09] Dr. Katie Deming: I'll just do it.” And I'm like, “Okay,” but I often get those emails from you guys when you get stuck and you get, you know, freaked out that you don't know what you're doing, and I can't jump in at that point. So it's something really to think about with prolonged fasts is that you do wanna do it in a guided setting for having someone who knows, you know, how this process works.

[00:08:29] Dr. Katie Deming: [00:08:30] But let's get into the magic of actually Really is happening after that first week, and this is day eight. This is honestly, in my mind, where everything converges, and this is the part that nobody talks about because actually most people are not doing this going past, seven days of fasting. You know, there are some fasting centers, but generally, people are not talking about this because not a lot of people are doing it, and certainly not for cancer.

[00:08:53] Dr. Katie Deming: So after the detox work of days four to seven is done and you're into day eight, this is when [00:09:00] people really drop into the fast. This is when deep autophagy truly sets in. And let me define this word because I'm using this word in a very specific way, because it gets thrown around, and also there's a couple ways that you can use it, so I just wanna be clear about the way that I'm using autophagy in this setting.

[00:09:17] Dr. Katie Deming: So autophagy literally means self-eating, and it's your body's cellular cleanup and recycling, breaking down damaged parts, old proteins, worn-out components, and either clearing out them or [00:09:30] reusing for them for fuel. Okay? autophagy runs at a low level all the time But in a long fast, it ramps way up.

[00:09:39] Dr. Katie Deming: And under that pressure, the body doesn't choose at random what it's going to use to break down. It goes after the damaged, dysfunctional, diseased material first. Okay. People always think of autophagy or autophagy as like what happens at around 36 hours for intracellular protein recycling, okay?

[00:09:59] Dr. Katie Deming: That [00:10:00] happens around 36 hours. But there's another level of autophagy that starts, I would say, around day seven, but clearly you're in it at by day eight. And what this is, is this is actually where the body recognizes, “Okay, we've gone seven days with no food coming in. We have to try– We have to start prioritizing the tissue that we're gonna use as our fuel because we don't want to go after our brain or our heart or our liver or our lungs or our kidneys, you know, our vital organs.

[00:10:29] Dr. Katie Deming: We want to [00:10:30] preserve those.” So the body has, in its innate wisdom, a way to prioritize diseased, dysfunctional tissue and foreign proteins as its primary fuel source when you get past, around day seven of fast. And this is the thing, it's a little bit hard to say this because it's not like we have studies showing this like, you know, big studies showing, “Okay, at this day we see this much shrinkage of tumor,” but we know that in the, the case studies of [00:11:00] showing people who've had their tumor shrink, it usually starts to happen after this point in the fast, at around seven days, right?

[00:11:07] Dr. Katie Deming: So this is when shrinkage of tumors, cysts, lipomas becomes possible. And I wanna say, I wanna be really clear that it's possible. This is not promised for everyone who fasts. We cannot predict what your body is going to do, but it is possible for tumors to shrink or go away in this [00:11:30] portion of a fast where you get into autophagy and the body is using its own dysfunctional or diseased tissue as its fuel.

[00:11:39] Dr. Katie Deming: And this happens, like you'll see fibroids. People will just fast, you know, maybe they were doing it for weight loss or some other, reason or spiritual reasons, and then Fibroids just go away. And I've actually had that in my fast, seen quite a few people with fibroids just disappear. Lipomas, all, all the time lipomas disappear with fasting.

[00:11:57] Dr. Katie Deming: Not that they're problematic, but people don't like to have [00:12:00] these fatty tumors, you know, on them. And so, these are s- things that I see shrinking in front of me as people are fasting. So, this is when this is possible. It's not guaranteed, but it is possible. And at that same threshold, there's an inner shift that arrives.

[00:12:18] Dr. Katie Deming: And I always love, like, the second week of my fast. The first week is really… It's challenging. That's my challenging week with my fasters 'cause they're all, like, freaked out and they're all like, you know, [00:12:30] excited and nervous and, you know, “I think I'm dying,” and all of that happens in the first week of the fast.

[00:12:35] Dr. Katie Deming: And that's another reason to do a guided fast is because there's a lot of things that can happen that are very normal but freak people out while they're fasting. So anyway, day eight is my favorite because this is when the mind quiets and people start to just really drop in. W- And the way that I would describe it is it's almost like a space opens up, and all of a sudden You…

[00:12:59] Dr. Katie Deming: Everything [00:13:00] slows down, and you can see your own patterns in motion. So, like emotional patterns that you've been running your entire life that you just can't see because you're so in it, these start to surface for you, and you have awareness of things that you couldn't see before but have been lifelong patterns that have kept you stuck.

[00:13:20] Dr. Katie Deming: Like, people start to see this in the second week of a fast. Healing crises also happen, and this is when disease processes [00:13:30] start resolving themselves, but they do it in reverse. You know, we don't watch how the body naturally heals in Western medicine because we're just too busy giving medications for symptoms.

[00:13:41] Dr. Katie Deming: But when you watch the body heal itself, it does it in reverse, right? And in naturopathic school, this is what they're taught. Like, but for me, I was never taught this because I was in Western medicine, and this stuff is just not taught. So, I want people to understand this, that if you were taught like me, or maybe you've never heard this, is that [00:14:00] when the body heals itself, it heals in reverse.

[00:14:04] Dr. Katie Deming: So, the symptoms that you had with that condition are going to get worse before they get better, and this is what we see in the fasting. And, and first, I didn't know this when I started, but, the first client who had this experience was she was a smoker for decades, and she had quit, like, 20 years ago, but sh- her smoker's cough came back during the fast.

[00:14:26] Dr. Katie Deming: And it was so amazing 'cause it came back, and it [00:14:30] lasted for, I don't know, it may have lasted, like, four or five days or something, and then it healed to never come back. And, like, it's very common to see that where people have an old injury or a surgery site or something, and in the fast, at some point, once you get past the first week, you'll see that the pain in that area increases, which is really a good thing because it signals repair that's happening in that area.

[00:14:54] Dr. Katie Deming: And when I see that, I always know, okay, this is great because whatever condition it was, it's [00:15:00] gonna be better. I can't tell you exactly, like, what percentage better or that, but definitely people come out, and they report resolution of, like, symptoms they've had for decades or, you know, a really improvement in those symptoms that are, benefits for their quality of life.

[00:15:15] Dr. Katie Deming: They're gonna feel better if they're not in pain, right? so That is something that happens. The healing crisis happens starting at about day eight. the microbiome die-off really start this at, at this point, which is interesting 'cause a lot of my fasters will start burping [00:15:30] at like, you know, the week mark, and they're like, “Why am I burping?

[00:15:33] Dr. Katie Deming: I'm not eating anything.” And I'm like, “Yes, that we're hitting the microbiome.” So now the microbiome is dying off, and this is something that you don't get in just a short 72-hour fast or even up to a five-day fast, right? so these are things that are another tier of benefits that comes with prolonged fasting that doesn't come from shorter, more frequent fasts.

[00:15:55] Dr. Katie Deming: the physical clearing and the inner peace arrive [00:16:00] together, which is so beautiful. So people are like, they've just cleared out after the detoxification, and they're clear, and then their physical body starts healing things, so they may notice symptoms, and at the same time, all of their emotional patterns are rising, and they're, they're seeing things in ways that they've never seen them together.

[00:16:20] Dr. Katie Deming: And you can see how all of this goes together, emotions and physical healing. And you can only reach this beautiful stage of a [00:16:30] fast by traveling through the days before it, right? You have to go from day one all the way through day seven to get to day eight, and this is getting to San Francisco. You can't get here from Eugene and back.

[00:16:43] Dr. Katie Deming: You can't just make that short trip and get all the way to that beautiful destination. So I think, you know The thing that I want people to take away from this is it's fine to actually do three-day fasts and do them once a month. I do that. I tell my people to do that. I love that. But [00:17:00] I don't want you stacking a bunch of fasts every week thinking that by doing these short fasts repeatedly, you're going to get the benefits of a prolonged fast.

[00:17:09] Dr. Katie Deming: the goal is to fast long enough to reach your destination, to reach what matters for you, right? So and that's another reason why I always want people to know what is your goal with fasting, because whatever your goal is is gonna determine what is the right type of fasting for you. There's so many ways to fast, right?

[00:17:26] Dr. Katie Deming: You can intermittent fast. You can do a 24-hour fast. You can do a [00:17:30] 36-hour fast, 48 hours, 72 hours, five days, you know, seven days, beyond. There's all these ways that you can fast, and so y- you need to know what your goals are. And I would say if you're fasting for cancer, it deserves one prolonged fast. Like, let's get to San Francisco once in your, you know, healing.

[00:17:48] Dr. Katie Deming: So this is exactly why I do this, why I guide people through prolonged fasts. One, because I told you that it's risky for people to do this by themselves, so I don't want people doing this by themselves. I want them to [00:18:00] have someone alongside to just know the right things to do. And it's not like it's complicated, and I think that's why people are like, “Just, you know, do it by yourself.”

[00:18:09] Dr. Katie Deming: But it's not complicated, but it's tricky. Like, and there's things that you need to know. So this is why I… And I didn't wanna fast people. This is the other thing that I think is so funny. Like, I didn't actually want this to be my practice. I heard about fasting from my mentor. I thought it sounded crazy.

[00:18:26] Dr. Katie Deming: He said nine days to start. I thought that was crazy. Then he [00:18:30] said fast people for 30 days, and I literally was like, “This is insane.” But I'm like If I have someone who's willing to do it, then I guess we gotta try it, right? And then Christi Miller, who's been on my show several times, who I love, she was like, “I'm game.”

[00:18:46] Dr. Katie Deming: She had come to me through my mentor, and so she trusted the guidance and was like, “Let's do it.” So she had that, a miraculous result. If you haven't, heard my interview with her, definitely listen to that one. But basically, she had breast cancer. spread to [00:19:00] her brain. The, tumor in her brain completely disappeared after her fast, and she had radiosurgery, which should have left something there, like necrosis and damage.

[00:19:10] Dr. Katie Deming: And also, the tumor often looks bigger after radiosurgery initially before it decreases in size, and hers was completely gone. So I was like, “Okay, I've got my– You've got my attention now with fasting.” And then the second person had a breast cancer. She was supposed to have a mastectomy. She fasted for 14 days, and her tumor went away.[00:19:30]

[00:19:30] Dr. Katie Deming: And I'm like, “Okay.” I'm like, “I definitely am paying attention, but I don't wanna do this. This is crazy.” Like, I– But like, it scared me 'cause I didn't know anything about it. I had no training in this. And so I started sending people to the fasting centers. And what happened was, is that I learned that the most important part of a fast is refeeding, and these fasting centers were refeeding With fruit juices, with rice, with legumes, with all kinds of things that people with cancer I, I truly feel [00:20:00] should not be eating because cancer is a metabolic condition, and these are things that are not going to help, your glucose, your insulin, your IGF-1, all of those things, your inflammatory markers.

[00:20:10] Dr. Katie Deming: So, I was like, “I can't send them, so I guess I need to do this.” And initially it was just on my lunch hour. Like, people had found me, so now all of a sudden I'm like, “Well, I can't… I gotta do this, I guess, on my lunch hour.” So it– this is just how I ended up in this. But the reason why I do this is because I don't want, I wouldn't want anyone that I [00:20:30] know doing this by themselves, because it's tricky, and you can get in trouble.

[00:20:35] Dr. Katie Deming: And once you're in trouble, you're in a spot that, like, Western medicine doesn't know to help, how to help you, and other people who haven't been along with you on your journey are gonna be unlikely to jump in at that, like, critical moment. And so it could be really dicey and scary for people. So, you know, this is why I do what I do.

[00:20:52] Dr. Katie Deming: This is why I fast people. But I think that, you know, if you're interested in learning about this, I [00:21:00] offer a free class that, that teaches you, okay, what are the benefits of prolonged fasting? ‘Cause I've learned so much just from doing this now, I guess it's been a year and a half of… and I've fasted about 100 people now and really learned, you know, what is, like, what do you need to know for this and, and how to guide people, and then also how to use the fast as this opportunity to go deep in emotional healing and m- programming the subconscious and releasing trauma from the subconscious.

[00:21:27] Dr. Katie Deming: There's so many things that when you're in a fasted state, you [00:21:30] can get even more benefit. So, you know, this is why I do this. I have this free class that teaches you kind of what I think is possible through fasting and how to do it, like how I do it, and, and then offering you, if you're interested, to come, apply to fast with me.

[00:21:46] Dr. Katie Deming: So I, I would love it if you guys were interested in learning more about fasting just to join me for one of those classes so that you could see, like this is a healing tool that I, I mean, I should've been taught about this in medical school. I don't know why I [00:22:00] wasn't. But this is definitely something people should know about.

[00:22:03] Dr. Katie Deming: And what's beautiful about it is that when it's done right, it's nothing but positive for the body. It detoxifies the body. It resets the microbiome. We refeed you in a way that heals and seals your gut, which promotes the immune system, and it, you know, improves your metabolic flexibility, helps you release and heal past trauma, helps you program your subconscious mind, and connects you with the divine [00:22:30] and authentic self.

[00:22:31] Dr. Katie Deming: So I pretty much feel like this is the one tool that everyone needs to know about, and I would love it to have you come join me, in one of my classes. So I wanna summarize though. I like just totally went on a tangent, but I… Like this is what I'm doing now because I'm so passionate about it, because I love seeing people heal and, and not have a bunch of toxic side effects.

[00:22:57] Dr. Katie Deming: In fact, actually the side effects are like positive. People [00:23:00] find more things that are, you know, that have been helped through fasting. So I'm super passionate about it and, I'm, you know, grateful that you allow me to share and, and really spread the word around how valuable this healing tool is.

[00:23:12] Dr. Katie Deming: And you know, one thing I wanna say is that if you hear from experts in the space of cancer like Thomas Seyfried or, Dr. Berg, who's not necessarily a- an oncologist, but doctor who's widely respected online for metabolic health, Dr. Jason Fung, [00:23:30] all of these, experts would say that they would do a prolonged fast if they were diagnosed with cancer.

[00:23:36] Dr. Katie Deming: So that tells you something. And then now as an oncologist who does this, I'm like, “This is something. We should be doing this.” so anyway, I'm excited that you're here. I'm excited that you wanna learn. And so to summarize what we've talked about in this episode, these are the key points we've covered.

[00:23:54] Dr. Katie Deming: First, short fasts are genuinely good. They build metabolic flexibility. They lower [00:24:00] insulin, then IGF-1, and they put a real pressure on cancer cells. Researchers like Thomas Seyfried and Valter Longo have shown this, and I never want you to think that shorter fasts are a waste. They are not. The second thing is short fasts end right where the deep work begins.

[00:24:16] Dr. Katie Deming: So think of it like driving from Portland to Eugene and turning around. No matter how many times you make that trip, you never arrive in San Francisco, because every time you break a fast, you drive all the way back home and start over. So that's the second [00:24:30] thing that we learned. And then the third thing is that there is a threshold in fasting around day eight that you can only reach by going the full distance.

[00:24:38] Dr. Katie Deming: That's when the deeper cellular cleanup sets in. That's when the shrinkage of tumor and cysts becomes possible. And at the very same time, when the mind quiets and a real sense of peace becomes available, the physical and emotional healing arrive together. You cannot stack your way there. You have to travel [00:25:00] through it My hope is that you leave today's episode trusting yourself a little bit more.

[00:25:05] Dr. Katie Deming: Your body knows how to do this. And know that healing was never about doing more or more often. It's about going the full distance once and giving your body the time and space it was designed to use to heal. Thank you so much for listening. I know your time and attention are valuable, and I'm grateful that you chose to spend time with me today.

[00:25:28] Dr. Katie Deming: I release episodes [00:25:30] every Tuesday, and I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode. If today's episode made you curious about what a prolonged fast could actually do for you and how to do it safely, I have a free class, as I mentioned before, that walks you through the real benefits of a prolonged water fast and how it works. And you can watch it now. The link is below. Thanks so much.