Dr. Katie Deming [00:00:00]:
Could you go 21 days, 30 days, even 42 days drinking nothing but water? Today's guest has helped over 15,000 people through prolonged water fasting. I'm talking with Loren Lockman, founder of Tanglewood Wellness Center, one of the largest water fasting facilities in the world. He has guided people through water only fast lasting up to 42 days. Can you imagine going that long without food? Lauren talks about how fasting allows your body to rest, detoxify, and heal. Learn exactly how it works, the dangers of doing it unassisted, and the incredible health outcomes his clients have experienced. Whether you're just curious or seriously considering a fast, this is a conversation that will help you decide if water fasting is for you. You're listening to Born to Heal podcast, and I'm your host, doctor Katie Deming. After 2 decades of practicing as an oncologist and caring for thousands of patients, I've seen firsthand how our health care system places obstacles in your path to true healing.Dr. Katie Deming [00:01:06]:
My guests and I will bridge the worlds of western medicine and alternative healing to help you achieve optimal health. Expect to uncover new insights, share a few laughs, and maybe even shed some tears along the way. But most of all, we'll learn how to heal from within together. So let's dive into today's episode. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Born to Heal podcast. I'm very excited today that we have Lauren Lockman from the Tanglewood Retreat Center to talk to us about water fasting. So, Lauren, welcome.

Loren Lockman [00:01:40]:
Thanks so much, Katie. It's great to be here with you.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:01:42]:
It's really a privilege to have you. So how did you get into water fasting, and how did that start for you? Just to give us a little background on on you. Sure. Sure. You know,

Loren Lockman [00:01:52]:
I think it's probably a fairly common story for those of us that wind up in go going the alternative ways, one of the alternative ways. But I wound up, 23. I got very sick out of college. And 6 months out of school, I found myself very sick, later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, systemic Candida, and 57 allergies, oh, and a chronic sinus infection. I became allergic to everything. I got worse with 3 years of medical care, and I know that doesn't surprise you. Your your own background has has led you to the same similar conclusions as mine, I suspect. Finally woke up one day and realized that, you know, as well meaning as these doctors, and I had I every year, I changed doctors because I was like, this guy doesn't know what he's doing.

Loren Lockman [00:02:36]:
I found somebody else. Had the same experience, found somebody else. After the third one, a year into it, I thought, okay. You know what? It finally occurred to me that taking toxic medications could never heal my body. It wasn't possible. And I started looking around for an alternative. I I I wanted my health back. You know, it's interesting and I hope maybe some of your audience, your listeners can appreciate this, but I consider myself incredibly fortunate that I got sick, the sick, at 23.

Loren Lockman [00:03:09]:
Because if I'd been 53 or 63, which is I'm about to turn 63 now, had it happened now, 40 years later, I probably would have said, well, let's just I mean, I'm getting older. This is what happens. But back then I thought, No, it's not okay. I mean, I had full use of my body. Now I was exhausted all the time, could barely do anything, felt terrible every time I ate anything, and I thought, this isn't okay, and there has to be a way to heal. And so I started looking around. I was looking for answers. I went back I'd started studying nutrition at 14.

Loren Lockman [00:03:40]:
I was very interested in health and human potential, and so I went back to nutrition 9 years later and realized I was doing everything they said I should be doing. I wasn't you know, here I was sicker than anybody I knew at the time. I mean, I I wasn't it wasn't these weren't life threatening illnesses, but I went from being a a vibrant, healthy kid to being unable to function at 23. And so I kept looking, and and what I what I realized was that first of all, healing, and for me, this is like the foundational piece, right? Folks, if you're going to hear one thing, hear this, please. Healing's a biological process. Only the organism can heal the organism, right? This is where we're we're so off track, and it's not just with Western medicine. You know, I know you went into it with your your heart and your mind wide open and you believed what you were told, but, again, toxic substances can't heal us. Whether they're drugs or herbs.

Loren Lockman [00:04:31]:
They're they're you know, this isn't how we heal the body. We heal the body by letting the body heal itself. And so what I realized was that every species on the planet, every species, including your cat or dog, will lay down and stop eating if sick enough or badly enough injured. Fasting is simply how we get out of the organism's way so that it can cleanse and heal. And it's interesting because obviously you know who Hippocrates was, first Western physician. Probably everyone listening to you knows his most famous quote, let your food be your medicine and your medicine your food. I'll bet not too many know what his next words were, because that was not the entire what he said was, let your food be your medicine and your medicine your food, but to feed yourself when you're already sick is to feed your sickness. He fasted his patience.

Loren Lockman [00:05:19]:
That's what people did back then. You know, until a 113 years ago, they taught fasting supervision in medical schools. That went out the window as soon as Rockefeller, John d Rockefeller, the 1st billionaire, began investing in pharmaceuticals. Change the game from then on.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:05:33]:
I didn't know that that fasting was taught before then. I mean, it makes sense. And I love hearing the second eating. They stop eating. And I love that you said if you take nothing away from this, know that healing comes from the organism because the name of the podcast is Born to Heal.

Loren Lockman [00:05:55]:
When I first heard from from your team, I'm like, born? That's awesome. Born to heal. Exactly. That's right. Born to thrive, and healing, of course, is part of that. You know, we're born to to function at an amazingly amazing level of health and vitality. In fact, I don't know if you wanna, you know, if I can jump to the end for just a minute in case people are don't have time to, but I went from being the sickest person I knew. I took over.

Loren Lockman [00:06:20]:
I walked away from medicine. I've never gone back. I've seen doctors for trauma. I'm still a little tiny bit of an adrenaline junkie. And so, I used to race cars. I flew a small airplane. I still surf and skydived and rock climbed, and so I injure myself sometimes. And I I you know, if I have like, if I have something serious, I'll I'll go to the emergency room.

Loren Lockman [00:06:45]:
I've I've severed an artery on 3 occasions. I think fasting is probably not the best way to approach that.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:06:50]:
Right. That sounds smart. Yes. Right.

Loren Lockman [00:06:53]:
You know, in case in case you listeners don't know, in 10, 15 minutes, you bleed out. Right? You don't stop the bleeding. So but what happened was within 6 months of taking over, fasting, and and ultimately making changes to my diet, which are directly related to the 4th phase of water, changing my diet, I became so much I was running a small commercial real estate company, but people would approach me and say, Oh my god, you look amazing. What do you do? Can you help me, my spouse, my kid, my parents? And I started helping people with their health, but since then, I was 26 when I walked away from medicine. That was 37 years ago. I haven't been sick a day since then, and my body literally works better today than it did at 18.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:07:38]:
I love it. And I think that you're right. A lot of people come to this space because of dealing with illness and being frustrated with not getting the answers and not getting better. So I I love hearing that story. I think, you know, one of the things that I would love to have you explain is, like, what is water fasting? Because I think there's a lot of different types of fasting, and some people get this confused. And so I wanna get a good definition from you to start so we can people know what it is we're talking about on this episode.

Loren Lockman [00:08:11]:
Right. And and, you know, in fact, if it's okay, well, I'd like to to back up even just a tiny bit further and and say, you know, fasting, first of all, again, to to most people and to me included when I first learned about this, it sounded pretty radical. Right? I learned about it from a guy who'd been dead for 50 or 60 years, and he was talking about people going weeks without food. And I thought, okay. That sounds pretty extreme. But at the same time, it got my attention, and I was looking for an answer. I you know, I hadn't found anything yet, and so I thought I would try this. But let's start with the fact that everybody fasts.

Loren Lockman [00:08:45]:
We acknowledge this in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and, they're Portuguese. The 1st meal of the day is break fast. We're fasting every day. Now the truth is that an 8 to 16 hour fast isn't going to do a lot if you're dealing with a serious issue. K? But when we lived on a cleaner planet, you know, maybe you didn't have to go too much longer. It was Plutarch. Instead of medicine, fast for a day. And and back in Plutarch's day, maybe a day was long enough.

Loren Lockman [00:09:17]:
We live on a different planet today. The world is much more toxic. Most people's bodies are are far more toxic and dehydrated than they probably would have been back then. And so a day is not long enough, but fasting is simply the voluntary abstinence from all NutriMed. Okay? And I think this is really important because all Nutriment meant what this means is no calories and no nutrients. Now there are people out there that say, well, it's okay to drink coffee or tea because it doesn't contain calories, assuming there's no sugar or milk in it. But but the problem is is that it contains nutrients. All plants do.

Loren Lockman [00:09:52]:
Anything comes from plant contains nutrients. When your body sees those nutrients, about a third of your energy goes to your digestive tract. So there are there's a whole cascade of beneficial physiological changes that occur in the absence of calories or nutrients. If we're adding anything up, we're not there. We're we're still in what I call feeding physiology, not fasting physiology. K? So

Dr. Katie Deming [00:10:15]:
Can I ask you a question? Does that include electrolytes?

Loren Lockman [00:10:18]:
It does.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:10:19]:
Okay.

Loren Lockman [00:10:20]:
Yes. Now and this this sounds crazy to most people, but but think about this for a second. You know, it's funny. I responded today to a prospective client who said he's been asked, but, yeah, but even not even electrolytes? I said, no. I mean, we listen. I'm I don't know everything about this, certainly. You know, as as I've already explained, I came about this, not through an ivory tower, not not through being trained academically, but through my own experience. I have now, for the last 28 years, run the world's largest water only fasting center, dedicated fasting center, and have guided more than 10,000 people through fasts, averaging 26 days.

Loren Lockman [00:11:00]:
Now again, this is a little shocking because I was going to say, you know, so fasts can range from, right, you know, from hours up to quite a long time. The longest fast in history was 382 days, although they did cheat. They actually had they took electrolytes. My my own longest fast with a client was 18 and a half weeks on only water. Nothing else. K? Now people say, oh, but that's crazy. It's dangerous. This guy said to me, but but all these people have warned me of the dangers.

Loren Lockman [00:11:26]:
I said, right. How much experience do they have? These people telling me this. K? There's there's precious few studies on long term fasting, so there's not much that science knows about this. But we've done this more than 10,000 times, and we never run into problems. I learned the hard way that we need to make sure people's electrolytes are okay, specifically sodium, potassium, and chloride. We're not concerned about magnesium, calcium, many of the other electrolytes because they're not going to be critical to our survival. But as you well know, if your sodium chloride or potassium is out of whack, well, your heart could stop, and that's usually not a good thing.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:12:03]:
So that's a question that I have for you is so before someone does a fast, you So before someone does a fast, you tack electrolytes

Loren Lockman [00:12:13]:
and make sure that they're balanced before got it. Absolutely. We wanna make sure that's those 3, sodium chloride and potassium, are within the normal range. Now to be honest with you, I'm not completely convinced that they need to be within the normal range. You know, as as you may well know, the average person in North America now gets 61% of their calories from ultra processed foods.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:12:31]:
Oh, wow.

Loren Lockman [00:12:32]:
K. What what those things have in I don't wanna call them foods, but what those things have in common is they typically contain a lot of salt. Most people are taking in so much sodium chloride, they're bound to have higher levels than are really necessary. And yet normal ranges are based on where average people are. K? So my guess is we could actually be fine being significantly lower than that. But we're looking for people to be, you know, if not I mean, I'm okay if they're at the very bottom of the range for sodium or chloride. That's okay. Potassium probably should be a little higher than that.

Loren Lockman [00:13:07]:
And as long as we start them there, we we haven't run into problems. K? We did run into some problems earlier in my practice where we weren't checking those. And what happened was I had a woman, I mean, we've actually had people go as many as weeks vomiting 5 times a day and still be fine, but I learned the hard way it doesn't always happen that way. And we had a woman vomit twice and wind up in the hospital because her electrolytes were out of whack. And I thought, how is this possible, vomited twice? That doesn't seem likely. This was her 2nd fast with me. The first one was 26 or 30 days. She came back and did, I think, 21 and vomited twice on the 1st day of eating again.

Loren Lockman [00:13:48]:
She was already eating when this happened. And And I thought, how is this possible? It occurred to me they must have been out of whack to start with. So she came back a year later and said, I wanna fast again. I said, okay. But here's what I need you to do. 2 months before you come, I want you to check your sodium potassium chloride. They were all out of whack again. I had her with the for the sodium chloride, I had her drink it was mostly sodium chloride.

Loren Lockman [00:14:09]:
I had her drink celery juice 2 or 3 times a day for the next 2 months. Checked the numbers again. They were fine. We took her through the 3rd fast with no problem. So what we've seen is as long as people's electrolytes are balanced to begin with, they're gonna be fine. And it's interesting because nature gives us plenty of evidence that this happens. As as, again, you probably know this. I know your education was largely in human bodies, but you may be aware that we share most of our DNA with many other mammals.

Loren Lockman [00:14:40]:
I mean, over 99% identical to the chimps and bonobos. We show over 96% with a pig, and some people I know are closer to the map. But, you know, the the thyroid, arm or thyroid, comes from the thyroid hormone, the thyroid gland of a pig. Okay? You know, our systems are virtually ad hoc. There's 1 central nervous system that's been found in nature so far with 25,000,000 animals, so the systems are almost always the same. They need the same things we need. They need the same electrolytes that we need. Need.

Loren Lockman [00:15:10]:
Pregnant polar bears build a den underground. They go into this den. They birth 2 cubs at a time. They they're they're mammals, so they feed them their their own milk. And they come out 5 months later having consumed nothing. Okay? Nothing at all. How is this possible? K? They're not taking electrolytes. K? And so there's there's no reason for us to reasonably think that we would be different.

Loren Lockman [00:15:35]:
Then then there's many others dogs will sometimes go months without eating and be perfectly fine. K? Cats won't go as long. But larger animals can usually go quite a long time. Even even lizards will go months without a meal, without electrolytes. K? So there's there's really no reason for us to assume that we would need them. And the the scant research that I've seen so far says that at the beginning of a fast, electrolytes will dip a little bit, and then they'll stay relatively level. Now the truth is there's no long term studies. So what we're planning to do, I now employ an MD and have a second one coming on board in April, and the second one has a PhD in research in addition to her MD.

Loren Lockman [00:16:16]:
And so the plan is to begin publishing the data that we're collecting and and to be we're gonna we're gonna get the machine and test the electrolytes ourselves every week for anyone willing to allow it, or maybe we'll just make it required. So we'll be able to publish, you know, in a few years, thousands of pieces of data that show what happens with fasting. But we I mean, I can tell you from experience. As long as one can follow simple directions, the electrolytes aren't an issue.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:16:42]:
I love it. Well and I love that you're gonna start documenting your experiences and and publishing this because that's part of the problem is that there is not good data on this and you are poised perfectly to do this. So I I love that you're

Loren Lockman [00:16:58]:
embarking on that. We document quite a bit now. We just haven't published it. Yeah. We don't have everything, but, I mean, we, you know, we take we we measure about 10 or 12 different parameters every day and so we have a lot of data and the plan is to publish as much as we can and to measure even more. I'd like to, you know, we see people's vision, hearing, smell improve when they've been damaged. I mean, we we have not seen someone who is congenitally deaf begin to hear or someone who is born blind. Well, we did see a woman who was born blind and, wound up driving a car without glasses.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:17:33]:
Wow.

Loren Lockman [00:17:34]:
She had a lot

Dr. Katie Deming [00:17:35]:
of stuff. Wow.

Loren Lockman [00:17:36]:
I wish she didn't.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:17:37]:
So I maybe one of the things because I'm an oncologist and because a lot of the people who follow me have cancer or, you know, know someone who has cancer, I'm wondering if you can speak specifically about the benefits of fasting for someone with cancer.

Loren Lockman [00:17:53]:
Yeah. I'd be happy to. If it's okay with you, I I'd like first to talk about oncology practice from my perspective Yeah. As a layperson. Okay? And again, in fact, I'll I'll go even further. You know, I think is it is it fair to say that cancer is still considered, an idiopathic condition?

Dr. Katie Deming [00:18:15]:
Well, I think that, you know, they say it's driven by mutations in the DNA, and that's what we're taught, but only 5 to 10 Like, so I specialize in breast cancer, and only 5 to 10 of breast cancers are genetically related, and so 90% of the time, I'm saying, I have no idea why you had cancer, and that's part of the reason why I left is because like, I'm like 90% can't just be happening with no reason. So, yes, and it

Loren Lockman [00:18:43]:
They probably put up on the wrong side.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:18:45]:
Yeah. For the exactly. But for the audience, idiopathic means we don't know why they got cancer. And so, yeah, I I think that is true.

Loren Lockman [00:18:54]:
I I hope you'll forgive me for this because my my only brother's a doctor, and my favorite cousin's a doctor, and I I many doctors I love. But my my joke about this is idiopathic means it was diagnosed by an idiot.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:19:05]:
I'll forgive you for that.

Loren Lockman [00:19:07]:
Okay. So idiopathic, unknown cause, right? I believe that the cause is actually fairly simple. Okay? Here's what we know about cancer cells in the average body. The average body, yours and mine, and everybody listening, theoretically, there are cancer cells forming every day. And yet, only 50% of us wind up with cancer these days. K? Now it used to be a lot less when I was a kid, but what how come the other 50% don't wind up with this problem if there are cancer cells forming? The answer is a healthy enough immune function destroys those cells as they form. K? So we know that the body can destroy cancer cells. That's what it's intended to do.

Loren Lockman [00:19:47]:
The these these, rogue cells form naturally. It happens. I mean, for whatever reason, it it happens sometimes, and the body should be able to dispense with them. I believe that the reason that they're caused in the 1st place is because of toxicity and I think there's a significant amount of evidence to support that. Okay. If those toxins come in the form of particulate matter from cigarette smoke and they wind up in the lungs, there's going to be lung cancer. K? If you take chewing tobacco and put it in your mouth, you get lip, gum, or tongue cancer, wherever you're exposing to toxins. When state troopers on these long highways in the US would sit with their radar gun in their lap, constantly leaking radiation, They wound up with high rates of testicular cancer.

Loren Lockman [00:20:29]:
They now tell them, leave the gun in the holster until you see a car. Don't let it have it sit on your body. K? You're leaking radiation into the into the groin. You're gonna wind up with cancer at the groin somewhere, the test testicles in this case. And so I think it's clear that cancer happens when these 2 things come together, toxicity, a significant amount of toxicity, and poor immune function. Okay? So that's my starting point. This is what I believe is going on. And I, again, I've, I've probably seen far fewer cancer patients than you have, but I have worked with hundreds of people, including probably at least 51 with breast cancer.

Loren Lockman [00:21:08]:
In most cases, we see it healing, in most cases. So here so let let's now look at what you were taught in medical school or in your practice. Please correct me because obviously you're the expert here, k? But radiation and chemotherapy are intended to kill the specific tumor cells, right, but unfortunately wind up destroying other healthy tissues at the same time.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:21:31]:
Right.

Loren Lockman [00:21:31]:
It's very difficult to avoid that outcome. And so when we we talk about, look, there are 2 causes of cancer, toxicity. What do radiation and chemotherapy do to the toxicity of the body?

Dr. Katie Deming [00:21:41]:
They increase

Loren Lockman [00:21:42]:
it. They dramatically increase it. How about the body's immune system?

Dr. Katie Deming [00:21:45]:
They decrease it.

Loren Lockman [00:21:46]:
They dramatically decrease it, okay? This is why I believe that I mean, I'll tell you sadly, probably 2 thirds of the women that I've seen with breast cancer over the last 30 years are women who had already had cancer, were already treated conventionally, and were told, you're perfectly healthy. There's no tumor. You're perfectly healthy. K? 3 to 5 years later, in most cases, it was back and usually back with a vengeance, much worse than before. And I believe the reason why is because what they did was they suppressed a symptom. And again, I think this is a significant, it's a significantly important point to consider, that the tumor is not the problem. It's a symptom of a problem. It's a symptom of poor immune function and high toxicity.

Loren Lockman [00:22:35]:
And you can eliminate the symptom, which is all medicine does, but actually make the body less healthy. And I think that's what's happening.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:22:43]:
I I agree with you because this was part of my frustration before I left was like, yeah, we kill these cancer with through the treatment.

Loren Lockman [00:23:01]:
Right.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:23:01]:
So absolutely, I agree with that.

Loren Lockman [00:23:03]:
And again, listen, like all the other wonderful and well meaning doctors that I know, of course, you you went into medicine to help people, to heal. Of course. But from the standpoint of the institution, k, medicine is now driven by pharma. Pharma has no interest in seeing people get healthy. There's no money in health, not for pharma. Right. Pharma makes money when people stay sick. K? The intent you know, it's entirely possible that at some level, they know, oh, yeah.

Loren Lockman [00:23:33]:
They'll they'll be back.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:23:34]:
Yeah. And I don't think I think this is a clear like, a distinction to be made is that the doctors go into it because we're young, and we're we wanna help people, but then we get trained into this institution that is a business like you described. And so the the doctors hear this, and people who are in medicine may hear this and say, well, of course, I'm not doing that because I want them to come back. I'm doing this because I want to help them. But it's the system does exactly what it's designed to do, which is what you described is it helps the symptoms temporarily and it gives people quick fixes so they don't have to do the hard work to really heal the underlying problem. And so Exactly. It's fed by people's interest in having a quick fix and then the system being designed to not really help make people better because you're right. There's no money in that.

Loren Lockman [00:24:24]:
There's no question in my mind that doctors like yourself certainly have no intention of having people come back. They have they're trying to help people, but they've been trained in something that simply doesn't work or it does work. It's just that the outcome is not what people think it's supposed to be. The outcome is maybe supposed to be to get people back because that's what feeds the system. That's unfortunately the way it works. So I'd like now to answer your original question. How about fasting for for healing? So not for for cancer. Fasting, there again, there is not a lot of research that's been published so far, but some of the research there there is a study published that said from, the University of California that said that, doctor Walter Longo that I think it was 3 or 4 days of fasting completely regenerates the body's immune function.

Loren Lockman [00:25:11]:
When that study was published, I had a group of people who were 22 or 23 days into their fasts. And I said to them, what do you think about this? They all thought it was hilarious because what they had accomplished 18, 19 days past the 3 or 4 days that he said where you completely rejuvenated your immune system was, you know, was very very powerful. Longo's laboratory never studied FAST longer than that, okay? And so they were they, you know, they believed, well, this is as good as it gets. What if the body's immune function can actually be much better than science thinks it can be? Okay? What, you know, what if it's we're not supposed to get worse as we get older? This happens to most people. This I think is what's true. And so what we know with fasting is that we're dramatically improving the body's immune function, and we're detoxifying the body in the single most powerful effective way that there is. And so we eliminate the causes of cancer, and not only does the symptom go away, but it it shouldn't come back unless people go back and recreate the same. Yeah.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:26:16]:
And so, basically, you're describing that the autophagy is basically the when someone fasts and goes into ketosis and why this helps them detox by the body. But so but I want to also add here that, yes, you're doing 2 things, the detoxification and then helping with activating the immune system and boosting that. But the other piece is that we know that cancer only does anaerobic glycolysis, which is one form of metabolism that can only use sugar. And basically, when you're switching people from using sugar as a fuel or carbohydrates into fasting and ketosis where they're only using ketones, basically, you're also starving the cancer. So there's 3 things, actually, that you're doing.

Loren Lockman [00:27:13]:
Yes. That that's that's fair. Well put. You're absolutely right. And I'm not sure there's really too much more to say. I mean, you've it's you know, again, we're not gonna get too technical here. Yeah. Not not just because I think maybe some people listening won't understand, but because I wouldn't understand.

Loren Lockman [00:27:29]:
You know, I I approach this not as from from the role of the technician, the scientist. I mean, it's a scientific approach, but I don't have the training or the background. Mhmm. We don't really know exactly what's going on except to say that our amazing bodies in every moment of our lives are doing everything they can to cleanse, detoxify, and heal in every moment. K? They're limited by the fact that we're making lifestyle choices and simply being active enough that the body doesn't have the energy or the ability to do that. So when when we when we stop eating and rest as completely as possible because ultimately, you know, an early question, what is fasting? Well, it's not just not eating. It's resting as completely as we can. For any question or any issue we look at, there are myriad of opinions.

Loren Lockman [00:28:16]:
And there are people out there saying, no. You should be physically active while you're fasting. For me, the ultimate arbiter is always nature. Nature's perfect. K? If I'm not sure what to think or what to believe, I just look and see what happens in nature. And every species on the planet will lay down and stop moving. If you ever see your dog do this or a cat, they'll lay in one place. They may they may roll over, change position, or stretch, but they don't get on Facebook.

Loren Lockman [00:28:42]:
K? They don't go to ins you know, they don't do anything. They just rest as completely as they can. And this is absolutely critical because what we're trying to do is to liberate as much energy as we can so that the body can use that energy to cleanse and heal. Okay? Now I I wanna come back to to the 2nd piece of this though, the glycolysis, anaerobic glycolysis. I I don't think there's there's no argument. I I don't know how significant ketosis is. Ketosis happens because when we're fasting, within 3, three and a half days for most people, we run out of sources of sugar that the body is willing to part with. Right? As you may know, we start with what's in the digestive tract.

Loren Lockman [00:29:24]:
We go to liver glycogen. We haven't a way to test this but it doesn't make any sense to me that the body would use muscle glycogen. I I believe it's gonna conserve muscle glycogen and let's come back to the polar bear. When the polar bear and her 2 cubs emerge from the den, they've been feeding for 5 months. They're healthy and robust and have plenty of energy. She comes out 50% of the weight she went in at. Wow. K.

Loren Lockman [00:29:49]:
Remember, she's had nothing to eat or drink. She's coming out 50% of her weight. Now, if her body chose to use all the muscle glycogen because it's it's we're meant to run on sugar normally, we're right, it's normally sugar my metabolism. What house would she be able to move around now? I think she'd have some trouble if there was nothing there to fuel her her muscles. Before she has her 1st meal, on average, they're gonna hike 75 miles to get to the feeding ground. She better have something there to fuel her muscles. K? If if you're you're injured in the tropical jungle, we're we're tropical animals, I can say that you're in, Oregon, I believe. I'm currently in Texas.

Loren Lockman [00:30:29]:
It's cold here. Probably cold there too. Now I've got on a couple layers here inside a heated building. I would not want to be running around naked outside this time of year in Texas or Oregon or most other places on the planet. Only in the tropics is that possible. K? We can live we're intelligent enough to adapt to living anywhere, but our bodies are meant to live in tropical conditions. And right here in the center of your torso, it's got to be about 95 degrees all the time. We do that with clothing and heating systems, etcetera.

Loren Lockman [00:31:00]:
So we're in the tropical jungle. You get injured. You're lying on the floor because you you can't do any you can't get up. You can't move. You can't go anywhere. You fast because you have no access to food, and you heal faster as a result of this. Right? I mean, it's an interesting thing. If you're injured and can't get to food, it actually serves you better because you're going to heal faster that way.

Loren Lockman [00:31:19]:
Let's say it's a week. Now you're you feel better. Again, wouldn't it be useful to have some muscle glycogen to fuel your muscles so you can go climb the tree, get the food you need? Right? Whatever. Alright. So what most people don't realize is that starting and this scares people, but there's no reason to be scared. But starting about 18 to 24 hours into the process, the body begins to use muscle. The body wants to run on sugar. K.

Loren Lockman [00:31:43]:
I've got clients that are over 400 pounds. You know, they they're more than twice as big as they should be. They're 65, 70% fat, and the body is taking muscle to get sugar rather than going right to fat. Someone recently commented that doesn't make any sense. I'm, like, maybe not. You think it doesn't because you don't understand. The body wants to run on sugar, not fat. That's what we're made to do.

Loren Lockman [00:32:05]:
There are some benefits, obviously, for people that have diabetes. If they avoid carbohydrates with a ketogenic diet, they're not gonna have any blood sugar problems, right, if there's no carbohydrates coming into the system. But that's kind of like and saying, well, I've fixed my problem. It's kind of like saying a vampire a vampire says, well, I just don't go outside. You haven't fixed anything. K? We're meant to run on carbohydrates and you're not doing it. Now when we're fasting, because what the body gets to a certain point, for most people, about three and a half days in, where it says, oh, okay. Still nothing coming in.

Loren Lockman [00:32:38]:
I don't want to keep converting muscle to sugar. Right? Gluconeogenesis. I want to keep doing that. So let's start metabolizing fat instead, and we're gonna go into ketosis, but it takes 10 to 11 days to get to the point where we're fully in ketosis. Meanwhile, muscle metabolism, muscle conversion is coming down, fat metabolism is ramping up. Okay. It takes a while. And again, this is because the body is actually set up to run on sugar.

Loren Lockman [00:33:05]:
We see benefits even with shorter fasts where we're not significantly in in ketosis yet. We still see quite a few benefits. So there's a lot going on that's has, I think, has little to do with the fact that we're in ketosis. We're in ketosis because that's the fuel the long term fuel we have when there's no sugar available. Mhmm. K? But but I see people who maybe haven't fasted with me yet or after fasting, maybe there's still a tumor and it continues to shrink and disappear eating a fruit based diet. Now, you know, you you'd asked me to talk about fasting, and I I wanna talk about fasting, but I believe that like every other species, there's a natural diet for our bodies. Again, our systems are nearly identical to the chimps and bonobos who eat almost exclusively fruit when there's enough fruit available.

Loren Lockman [00:33:51]:
In the months where they can't get as much, they're eating other things. We always have sugar in our bloodstream, right? We have to, okay? This is why even when we are fully, quote unquote, fully into ketosis, there's still sugar. There has to be. And your body and again, we measure fat mass and muscle mass. We can see it's going down every day regardless what people do. The more they rest, the less they use. If they get enough water, the less they use. People don't think about this, but most of the water in the body is in the lean tissue.

Loren Lockman [00:34:22]:
Mhmm. K? So I'm a £150. I'm 10% body fat currently, which is a lot for me, but that means I have got 15 pounds of fat and fat is roughly 10% water. So I've got 1 and a half pounds of water in my fat. I'm a 100 and 35 pounds of lean mass and that's 75% water. So I've got, what is that, 90, a 100 almost a £100 of water in my lean mass and 1 and a half pounds of my fat. If I don't drink enough to support my body's needs, it's gonna cannibalize some muscle to get the water it needs. Okay? So let let's put that out there, but the body's always gonna be using some muscle even when it's fully in ketosis.

Loren Lockman [00:35:06]:
So there's always sugar in the bloodstream. I think the problem occurs not when we're in, anaerobic glycolysis, but rather when we are excessive sugar is a problem. And this is, of course, going on all over the place. I mean, how what percentage of the population's now overweight or obese?

Dr. Katie Deming [00:35:27]:
I don't even know

Loren Lockman [00:35:28]:
a lot. It's, with adults, it's well over 50%. Probably aware and and some of your listeners may not be, type 2 diabetes is over 90% correlated with obesity. And so most people are gonna be insulin resistant, which means their blood sugar is probably too high most of the time because the crap they eat and the excess weight that they carry. And so this is a problem for for cancer. The fact that their blood sugar's too high, that's gonna feed the cancer in the same way it feeds Candida and creates other issues. As long as we can maintain healthy blood sugar and by the way, Katie, I would suggest that you know, I was glad to see 5 or 6 years ago the AMA's recommendation that blood sugar, well, they used to say 110 was okay. Now they say it shouldn't be over a100.

Loren Lockman [00:36:13]:
I've been saying for 30 years, it should be between 60 and 90. No. Lower, 75, 80 is even better. That's what happens, believe it or not. And, again, this may sound crazy to people and I I mean, you're you're the direct this because your name's on the show here. But most people think fruit's a problem for sugar. But almost all fresh fruits have a low glycemic load, which means they do very little to raise blood sugar. K.

Loren Lockman [00:36:37]:
That's because of the fiber and the water that are present. Now the sugar is a problem when we fractionate it, when we're consuming high fructose corn syrup, which you are doing, listeners, if you're eating processed foods. You're getting a whole bunch of it. K? I don't eat any processed foods.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:36:53]:
Yeah. Well, I think that's the biggest problem is if we were eating real foods, that we wouldn't have all the problems that we have. And I knew this. I know that you're basically a fruitarian, and the there's huge benefits to that. And I do think that there is some misconceptions, but I think a lot of what it comes down what's interesting within the cancer space is there's actually data to support keto, There's data to support vegan. There's data to support, you know, fruititarian. But the thing is is that it all comes down to people changing and eliminating these things that we've been eating in the standard American diet that are not good for us. And so

Loren Lockman [00:37:35]:
Any diet that eliminates enough of the garbage is gonna be better for cancer than than the normal diet most people eat. And that's that's the thing.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:37:44]:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me, you know, the with the elimination of toxins and and the detoxification, one of the things that I've heard someone say, and I can't remember who it was that they said that, fasting shouldn't be uncomfortable. But when you're dumping toxins from your body and fasting, that's uncomfortable. And so I wanna ask you about this piece because

Loren Lockman [00:38:10]:
Yeah. I I came across that. My girlfriend actually follows someone on Instagram who said that just a couple weeks ago. Yeah. And I I didn't follow this person, but I commented just because, I mean, I don't normally want to get in other people's business. You know, she's got her program, whatever, but she's paying information. You know, what she said very specifically, if you're uncomfortable, you're fasting, you're doing it correctly. I wrote and said, hey, I've guided more than 10,000 people through pretty long fasts.

Loren Lockman [00:38:39]:
More of the people through fasts of 6 weeks or longer. We just had 3 more people complete 40 day fasts in this current session that we're wrapping up. And we see people doing amazingly well doing this, incredible things happening. Most comfortable, k, because, you know, what, again, what we're trying to do with fasting is allow the body to both detoxify and heal as rapidly as possible. And so, you know, people ask me all the time, will it work for this or that? Anything that can heal will heal more efficiently and more effectively with fasting than without it. But as the body detoxifies, we're picking up toxins from throughout the body. When the body is able to, what it prefers to do is to store toxins as much as possible of fatty tissue because that's where they're gonna be least harmful. It doesn't want to store them in lean tissue or organs.

Loren Lockman [00:39:28]:
Unfortunately, most people have toxins in their brains, you know, throughout the body, everywhere. Okay? But still, it's going to be primarily in the fatty tissue. So as the body metabolizes this tissue, most of these toxins wind up in the bloodstream. K. Then they're going to be filtered out through the kidneys. Right? As you know, 60 times a day, roughly, the 2 kidneys are filtering the blood, taking all the garbage out that the body doesn't want there, including stuff that it wants but needs to have in specific proportions And so you can't have these toxins dumping into your bloodstream without feeling it. You are gonna experience that. This this is simply, you know, someone who really doesn't know what she's talking about.

Loren Lockman [00:40:08]:
A process can be somewhat uncomfortable. In fact, you know, when I go to prepare our clients for it in our pre fasting call, we've already sent them information, then we do a call with me, And I'll prepare them by saying, you know, you could experience all manner of symptoms. What each person experiences varies, not only from person to person but from fast to fast. So if you were to fast now for 21 days, for instance, you would have, you know, a certain experience. If you did it a year later, it would be a different experience because you'd literally be living in a different body. K? And so the experience is gonna be different. It's gonna depend on, first of all, your genetic inheritance. We all have genetic strengths and weaknesses that partly determine how we respond to every stimuli.

Loren Lockman [00:40:52]:
The quantity of, nature of, and location of toxins in your body, that's gonna significantly impact what your experience looks like. And finally, your level of vitality. And this is something most people don't think about, but it takes energy to detoxify. Okay? So symptoms, first of all, I don't know if we really defined this, but symptoms, which most people think are the problems that we're dealing with, are not never the problems. They're just symptoms. They're evidence that the body is actually attempting to cleanse or heal. And so the last thing we wanna do is suppress symptoms. Right? Unfortunately, it's what medicine's pretty much focused on, exclusively.

Loren Lockman [00:41:30]:
Right. Instead, we want to empower the body to do whatever it needs to to eliminate the symptoms. And I'll give you a very simple example. Everyone's probably woken up with a head full of mucus. Most people walk over to the medicine cabinet, take something they already own, which dries up, you know, eliminates the mucus. Oh, gone, all's well. Okay, but hang on. Your virtually infinitely intelligent body created that mucus to encapsulate proteins that didn't belong in your bloodstream, your body, so that you could get rid of them without them harming you.

Loren Lockman [00:42:01]:
Okay. Capsaicin, the molecule that makes hot peppers hot, burns your tissue. So when you eat spicy foods, your body makes mucus to protect you from the stuff you're eating, k? If we get rid of the mucus, how does the body safely eliminate these things? Well, it can't. We prevent that from happening and most people think well, because there's no more symptom, I'm better. Absence of symptoms does not constitute health. When people have low enough vitality, there will be no symptoms. You asked me to talk about how water only fasting differs from other types of fasting. One of the things that's become trendy over the last 5 or 8 years is dry fasting and it is completely insane.

Loren Lockman [00:42:47]:
I know personally knew 6 people now dead as a result of dry fasting. K? What happens is, as again, I'm sure, you know, I I don't know if you're familiar with doctor Andrew Kaufman. He's a client of mine. And when he fasted with me, I was talking about this with a group that he was with and he say, he raised his hand, said, you know, one of the first things they taught us in medical school is if we're dehydrated, we're potentially damaging the kidneys. K. This is what happens because as the kidneys are filtering your blood, if there's not enough liquid there relative to the amount of stuff the body's getting rid of, that stuff is actually gonna scar the kidneys, which are very sensitive to tissue. And this is what happens. In the case of of 1 1 person who died, he he said on Facebook, Lauren is the, you know, is the best coach, health coach in the world, but he wouldn't take my advice on this.

Loren Lockman [00:43:36]:
And he was dry fasting and eating an optimal diet, in my opinion, high water, but not drinking any water. And he, his doctors said after he died, he died because his kidney shut down and then everything else followed. Okay? So there's water present for the body to be able to detoxify. And this is a significant part of what of what's happening and and why dry fasting is is so misguided. We we see people I think we had 3 or 4 people this we haven't fasted about 6 people in the last 60 people, excuse me, in the last 10 weeks. We're we're at the end Saturday. Friday is the is the 70th day of a 10 week session. And we've had about 60 people come through the center over this this period.

Loren Lockman [00:44:19]:
Also work with people remotely, but at the center. And there were about 3 or 4 people who'd had a significant amount of dry fasting experience. They're always the most dehydrated people on campus. And to, again, this is a controversial subject, but eliminating the toxic material from the intestines, k, leukoid plaque, I know most most, practitioners think it doesn't exist. I I don't know if it exists or not. If it doesn't exist, then drinking only water produces hard foul smelling, difficult to eliminate material, which seems unlikely. Mhmm. What happens? Yeah.

Loren Lockman [00:44:54]:
You know, if you if you look at the digestive tract of a tiger, 500 pound tiger, it's 12 feet long. K? You can't be much more than a 120 pounds.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:45:06]:
Little bit more because I'm quite muscular, Yeah.

Loren Lockman [00:45:09]:
I have a woman faster with me right now who weighs 85 pounds. She's complete she's tiny. She's completed her process. She's now refeeding. She's feeling amazing. But her digestive tract is over 30 feet long. Digestive tract is 32 feet long. It's 2 and a half times longer than an animal that's 5a half times bigger than she is.

Loren Lockman [00:45:29]:
K? Animals that eat meat and, or omnivorous diets, meat and plants, tall, about 12 inches, right? In that space, there is, what, 20 plus feet of small intestine. It is all twists and turns and it is 1 ninth the the surface area of the large intestine, 1 third the diameter, 1 ninth the surface area. No. No. Excuse me. The the cross section area. It's, you know, it's it's a narrow tube. This is where stuff is getting stuck.

Loren Lockman [00:46:04]:
And if we're eating things that aren't high in water and fiber, a little tiny bit, even if it was 1 tenth of a gram getting stuck each day. Now if if most of your listeners are, you know, if you're from the US, you might not know, but there are 28 grams in an ounce. So a tenth of a gram is 1 200 and 80th of an ounce. It's it's like a little tiny bread crumb. Imagine that every time you ate a meal, something that size got stuck. If you do the math, in 25 years, you'd have about £10 of material. In 50 years, about £20 of material. And this see people that are eliminating pounds and pounds of hold hard material.

Loren Lockman [00:46:42]:
When they dry fast, the stuff becomes rock hard, you know, super hard and dry and very difficult to eliminate. Because it suppresses symptoms, they think they're okay, and so, you know, coming all the way back around, symptoms are nothing more than evidence. The body is attempting to do what it needs to do. We don't wanna try to suppress them, okay?

Dr. Katie Deming [00:47:01]:
And what are the symptoms? I know it varies from person to person and then fast to fast, but what are some of the symptoms that people describe when they're fasting?

Loren Lockman [00:47:09]:
Well, there are literally any symptom you could think of. It could be cold symptoms, could be flu symptoms, could be headaches, could be fevers, could be aches and pains. You know, it's I mean, it's crazy what we see. I'll give you an example. We had a guy recently who said to me one day, he said, my left knee is swollen. I said, oh, did you injure it? He said, no. He said, well, yeah, 20 years ago playing college football. I said, okay.

Loren Lockman [00:47:32]:
You were good, weren't you? He said, yeah. How'd you know? I said, well, I'm guessing that they either wrapped it up and put you back on the field or they put you back on the field a week later. He said, yeah. I played the next game. K. Well, you you know very well, Katie, that a major joint like a knee supporting much of your body's weight isn't healing in a week. And so they wrap it up, they inject you with painkillers, they put you back on the field, it never healed. Here, you know, 20, 40 years later sometimes, now it has a chance to heal for the 1st time.

Loren Lockman [00:48:00]:
We'll see the body sending more blood and lymph to the area. We call that inflammation, and people think inflammation is a problem. It's not. It's a solution. Virtually infinitely intelligent body creates this on purpose. Now if you're living in such a way that you constantly have inflammation, you probably need to make some changes. But when inflammation occurs, it's not the problem. It's your body trying to heal something.

Loren Lockman [00:48:22]:
So we'll see inflammation happen. Vision will get blurry for most people, especially if their if their eyes need to heal. Everybody comes out needing weaker prescriptions if they wear glasses, if they if they wear glasses, if they fast long enough. It's crazy what happens. We'll have people having all kinds of digestive distress, And, also, they'll they'll complain of pain usually on either the right or left side of the torso just above the hips. Why? Because that's where the ascending colon turns to become the transverse and the transverse on the other side turns to become the descending colon. The only places in the large intestine where there's any significant bend, this is where the heart masses that are coming out of the small intestine are likely to be painful or even get stuck. And they'll feel a heart mass.

Loren Lockman [00:49:07]:
We have a couple massage therapists who work with us. They're really good at finding this stuff. They'll move it along, someone will have a bowel movement the next day. By the way, my client who fasted 18 and a half weeks had a bowel movement in the last week of his fasting. More than four and a half months after his last meal. The bowel movements every single day. I have, like, just communicated with this morning. He's coming back in March for his 3rd stay.

Loren Lockman [00:49:31]:
The first 2 were 26 days and 42 days, respectively, fasting only water. He's had at least 1 bowel movement every single day he's fasted with the soul. Wow. Now he's got a big belly. Tank. Yeah. Where there's a big belly, it's not just fat. There's usually a whole bunch of stuff slowly moving its way making its way through the system, and that impacts everything.

Loren Lockman [00:49:52]:
As this stuff if it's hard and dry, no effect. But as we hydrate it, we begin reabsorbing toxins into the bloodstream through the wall of the intestine. We're meant to absorb nutrients through the intestines. So we're gonna absorb whatever's in there. And when this happens people don't feel well. They feel nauseous sometimes. They feel they might have fevers. They can have all kinds of pain.

Loren Lockman [00:50:14]:
We had a a guy actually with, stage 4 cancer, fasting with us, well, refeeding now. And he said to me the other day, I need an enema. And I said, well, you know, I mean, if you really can't handle it, we can do an enema. But we don't wanna do it if we don't have to because it's gonna flush out beneficial bacteria or the 10 trillion bacteria that live in that large intestine, the gut biome. We don't wanna flush any of that out. We don't wanna alter the pH of the colon. We don't wanna weaken weaken the bowel muscle. Now one fast wouldn't significantly weaken the muscle, but repetitive fasts or repetitive enemas would do that.

Loren Lockman [00:50:49]:
He insisted he had to have it. And I I was telling him, look, all you need to do is keep eating and keep sipping enough water. Most people don't eliminate on the 2nd day. It usually takes 4 days to eliminate. So we had someone go to a pharmacy to buy enema because we didn't have any left. And before he came back, the guy had a bowel movement. It was difficult and painful. It was a very hard mess, but that's that's what happens.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:51:13]:
It's so interesting. And a question I have for you is, are there people who shouldn't fast? I mean, you did identify that if people's electrolytes, you won't start them on a fast, but are there people who you don't think should fast? And then the other question I had was people who are on medications. Do you eliminate medications on the fast, or how does that work? So those are 2 questions.

Loren Lockman [00:51:35]:
Yeah. Yeah. So there aren't many people who shouldn't fast. You know, there there's there's widespread beliefs that there that people that have liver or kidney challenges can't fast because these are the primary organs of detoxification and they're gonna be too challenged. I would suggest that most people are challenging these organs much more as they live day to day than when they're fasting. When we're when they're fasting, they're resting completely. We're not burdening the body with all the stuff that we're putting in. The body can deal with that.

Loren Lockman [00:52:03]:
In fact, I have an interesting story that I I won't I'll give you the short version. A young man fasted with me and had an amazing experience. He had been depressed and having some fatigue. Law school can do that to people, I guess. He completely turned his life around fasting 21 days. Came back to me a year later. He's and so this was gonna be a remote fast and said, yeah, I wanna fast again remotely. Just before we started, he said, I disagree with you about how much water you have people drinking.

Loren Lockman [00:52:30]:
This time, I just wanna drink when I'm thirsty. Is that okay with you? I said, no. If you're not going to take coaching on this, I can't I can't work with you. And so he said okay, and he fasted on his own. He went up to the hospital for 3 months because he drank so little water that his kidneys, they said in the hospital at Amsterdam that he had 3% kidney function at the age of like 25 for a year. He was embarrassed. I mean, first of all, self out of the hospital. But a year later, he he wrote to me and said, I'd like to fast again with your guidance.

Loren Lockman [00:53:03]:
I'll do what you tell me to do.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:53:05]:
And how much water, yeah, how much water do you have people drinking?

Loren Lockman [00:53:08]:
Well, it varies from person to person, but virtually everybody needs at least 4 liters at the beginning of the process. How much they need goes up. Now it says the 2 healthy kidneys can process 1 liter an hour. I have not found that to be the case. Okay. When I've seen people try to do that, they invariably get themselves an electroelectro. So I ask people not to to drink more than 500 milliliters, half a liter per hour. That's roughly 16 ounces for the Americans.

Loren Lockman [00:53:35]:
Roughly, you know, 1 16 ounce glass per hour sipped slowly over the course of the hour. It's critically important because in any given moment, you know, if you guzzle half the glass, your kidneys can't process it that quickly. It winds up being dumped into the bladder and taking electrolytes with it. So in order to make sure we are not losing electrolytes, we have to take water to slowly. What I found is there is almost no I mean practically speaking, one could drink 12 liters a day. There's a small problem. They wouldn't get any sleep too. So Yeah.

Loren Lockman [00:54:03]:
Most people don't get past about 6 and a half liters, but there are people who need 7 or 8 liters. And it starts to get challenging to do that. But we have people doing it safely. We've never had a problem because they're drinking that much. I have I have a woman fasting with me right now who has been drinking 8 liters of day, every day, and she's perfectly fine. She she's actually completed a 40 day fast, her 3rd 40 day fast. By by the way, she did the first 2 on her own, and she came to me. You I wanna try this with you.

Loren Lockman [00:54:34]:
Money wasn't an issue. I wanna try with you, but really kind of thinking like, well, my body's clean. I already know everything I need to know. And now she's saying a very a very different line because this has been by far been much more powerful than she's ever done before. And I I guess I'd like to think that having done this so many times over the last 28 years, I've learned a few things about it. And so what we have people doing, rasping completely and sipping more water than most people do on their own, it changes everything. Mhmm.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:55:05]:
Yeah. Okay. And yeah. No. That's and that's helpful. That's a lot of water. That's, and the sipping part without the

Loren Lockman [00:55:12]:
And, you know, and with this guy with challenged kidneys, he had to we had to go very slow. We had to make sure we weren't overwhelming his body. He got a test done 3 months after his 2nd fast with me, a year after the hospitalization, and they said he was back to a 100% kidney function. So the people who shouldn't fast, if you're pregnant, if you are breastfeeding. K? It'd be fine for your body, not so good for the baby. Okay. So no no fasting. I mean, a day or 2 is okay but nothing beyond that if you're pregnant or breastfeeding.

Loren Lockman [00:55:46]:
Other than that, you have to have enough reserves to fast. But this again, this is shocking to most people. K? I see people all the time who are dramatically underweight because their systems are so loaded with old material. They cannot digest, absorb, or assimilate properly. Not all 3, necessarily. Any one of those things, and you've got a problem. Right? It doesn't matter what you put in your mouth. If you are not getting it into your cells, you have got a problem.

Loren Lockman [00:56:13]:
So there is a woman who fasted with me. She is 57, she weighed 88 pounds when she started her fast, okay? She fasted 21 days with no problem. In fact, there's a naturopathic doctor who just did her 4th fast with me, that woman did 5 fasts with me, was a type one diabetic, last a one c they said you no longer have diabetes. There's a naturopathic doctor who just did her 4th fast with me back in September. And when she first came to me, she's 5 six and weighed 85 pounds. K? Now she had been to our largest competitor, and they said to her, you're too skinny to fast. And then someone said, well, you could fast for a few days. She lost weight.

Loren Lockman [00:56:49]:
She could never put it back on. She came to me skinnier than when she went there, and she fasted with me for no problem no no problem at all. In this last fast, she started off at about £90, Okay, 5 6. She fasted for 21 days. We had a guy fasting at the same time who started off somewhere north of £325, okay, about 6 feet tall. He was losing and again, we are measuring fat loss every day he was losing an average of 2 to 4 pounds of fat per day. Now that sounds crazy. How does that happen? And I can't answer that, except, you know, what I would say is and you you mentioned metabolism earlier, but when the when fasting, his body keeps his metabolism high, cause it wants to get rid of all the excess weight.

Loren Lockman [00:57:35]:
It's a burden on the body. She was losing between 2 4% of a pound of fat per day. He was losing 1 to 200 times more body fat and chain. Okay. So when someone's very lean, metabolism slows way down so that they can they don't die. They can live a long time. We have a guy who just he's now on about day 10 of refeeding after fasting for 21 days. He wanted to do 26, but he got scared and stopped at 21.

Loren Lockman [00:58:08]:
He's six three and weighed about 105 pounds when he started. He's still alive. He's healthier than he's been in a long time. He's now eliminating hard stuff every day. And when he gets all this stuff out of the body, he'll be able to put weight back on. He would never be overweight until then.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:58:22]:
Wow. Okay. So being underweight for you is not a contraindication, but pregnancy, breastfeeding are absolute. And then anything else?

Loren Lockman [00:58:32]:
There are people we won't take. We don't want people that are difficult. Someone has to be open and coachable. They could benefit from fasting, but it's hard to help them if they won't take coaching. There are people who may be dependent on certain medications and I am not I mean, I won't fast people who have been diagnosed with psychosis if they're using drugs that they have to take to manage the psychosis, schizophrenia, for instance. Now we we actually fasted someone or have fasted people who I think it's they take something once a month now or once every other month. They get an injection.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:59:09]:
But otherwise, medic this gets to the medication question. So you have people not taking their medications if someone's on medication.

Loren Lockman [00:59:18]:
Yes. Yeah. By by the way, the the Maryland Medical Board, about 18 years ago, charged me with practicing medicine without a license, And when I pointed out to them that their statute said that practicing medicine means that you are either diagnosing, treating, or prescribing. They said, well, you're prescribing fast. I said, oh, can I prescribe a movie or a restaurant? I mean, I'm recommending someone fast. I think prescription, it means pretty specifically telling him to take this medication, a pharmaceutical. Right? I can't prescribe fast. Then they said, well, if someone comes to you and gets well, then you're obviously practicing medicine.

Loren Lockman [00:59:52]:
It was only later when I got home I had one of those moments, and I was like, well, I should've said. Well, it seems to me as someone comes to me and gets well, I am obviously not practicing medicine. They said that I was telling people, illegally telling people not to take their medication and I don't. What I tell people is I mean, I'll tell them that it's up to them. You know, they can take the medication or not, but if they wanna fast with me, they can't be taking medication. Yeah. You can't. They're toxic substances.

Loren Lockman [01:00:19]:
You know, medication, you know, for the listeners who may not realize this, medications have side effects because they're toxic substances. And what I would suggest is it's the toxicity that the body is reacting to in a way that creates symptomatic relief in most cases. I mean, they work in different mechanisms. But generally speaking, medications can make you healthier. They can just suppress symptoms. And so in order to actually heal the body, we need to have someone not taking medications. Now exceptions, there aren't really exceptions. If you are a type one diabetic and you rely on insulin, insulin is a hormone, not a medication.

Loren Lockman [01:00:56]:
Okay? I do not know how it is packaged and, you know, maybe it is not just a pure hormone, but people can take insulin if they need to. Similarly, if you have had your thyroid gland surgically removed or irradiated to destroy it and cannot produce thyroid hormones, which you need to survive, you can take T3 or T4 if you need to. Okay? You can take these hormones but no medications. And so, you know, some people say, well, I mean, I can't come off the medication. I'll say, okay. Let's you're not going to fast with me because I don't really think it's safe to fast someone who's taking it. It's interesting. People think, but I rely on this.

Loren Lockman [01:01:31]:
You I've got hypertension, it'll kill me if I don't take it. We have a 100% success with more than a 1000 hypertensive clients. Every single time, except 1. Okay. 99.9% success. We had a guy in his late seventies whose original starting blood pressure was 176 over, I forget what, and when he completed his fast, it was 126 over seventy five. And his he was the only person who's finished still above normal blood pressure, above 120. Statistically, we went from being a 112% more likely to die of heart attack or stroke than the average person's age to being 12% more likely.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:02:12]:
That is powerful.

Loren Lockman [01:02:13]:
And everybody else winds up under. So, yeah, I've never seen in the literature, we've had no experience of anyone having a problem with heart attack or stroke while fasting, even when they've just come off their medication. So it's fine. With most hypertensive drugs, I I think you can they can simply stop taking. With many drugs, as you know, they have to wean off of. Yeah. And so we we tell people, look. If you wanna do this, it's an amazing thing.

Loren Lockman [01:02:37]:
You'll have to wean off the drug. It's up to you. But that's what you would have to do.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:02:41]:
Got it. Well, it's been so helpful for me to learn from you and hear about your vast experience. I've I've heard so much about you and your center and, you know, people who've really changed their lives through going and doing a prolonged fast. So I'm wondering if you can just share with my audience, how can they find you and and that you offer both. It sounds like you offer both fasting on-site at Tanglewood, but then also remote supervision for fasting as well.

Loren Lockman [01:03:10]:
That's correct. Yeah. I mean, we have our clients so far have actually come to us from a 147 countries. There is really no place like Tanglewood that exists today. But there are people, you know, especially in places like Central America, Latin America, parts of Asia where people just Africa. People don't have much money. And so it's hard for them to, you know, to pay to be at Tanglewood. It's expensive.

Loren Lockman [01:03:33]:
We have 20 staff members. It's a spectacularly beautiful 37 acre campus, and it costs a lot to run. And I mean, I don't even pay myself a salary. There isn't much money there to do that. And then they have travel costs. So I work with people remotely. It costs them much less that way. Of course, for people that can get to us, I think there's clearly no comparison.

Loren Lockman [01:03:56]:
It's much better to be on-site if you can be. I mentioned this I think before we actually went live, but we we employ an MD. We also have a physician's assistant and a nurse who take vitals every day, and then there's a consultation. Currently, it's with the MD and I. I'm training her. The goal is for her to eventually take over. I have a 2nd MD coming on staff. People are perfectly safe if they can follow simple directions.

Loren Lockman [01:04:21]:
But, yes, I work with people remotely if they can't get us and we still see amazing things shifting. You can find me at TanglewoodWellnessCenter dot com. If you search my name, Lauren Lockman on YouTube, our Instagram or Facebook, I'm on those places. I'm not I don't spend much time on those places anymore, but you can find me there.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:04:41]:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's been a privilege to have you here with us, and, thank you so much.

Loren Lockman [01:04:47]:
Well, the pleasure is mine, Katie. Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:04:53]:
Thank you for joining me on Born to Heal. It's been a privilege to share this time with you, and I hope that today's episode has offered you valuable insights on your journey toward optimal health. Please consider subscribing, sharing this podcast with your friends, and leaving us a review. To learn more about how you can work with me, please visit katydemming.com. You can find additional resources in the episode show notes linked below, and remember to join us next week as we continue to explore more holistic approaches to healing. Until then, this is doctor Katie Deming reminding you that just like me, you were born to

Loren Lockman [01:05:35]:
heal.