Dave Asprey - Fast This Way

To my lovely wife, Dr. Lana, who is most definitely not

spending her time cooking breakfast anymore

The shamans instructions were quite specific: bring only a sleeping bag, a flashlight, water, and a knife for the vision quest. The first three items were critical for my survival. The last one was mostly for my peace of mind, apparently, because the biggest danger near my cave was coyotes, and coyotes dont usually attack people. But on this kind of journey, theres no simple boundary between physical and psychological well-being. Is there ever, really?

I had set off on my first vision quest in search of better health, greater self-awareness, and, above all, in the hope of achieving a deeper sense of peace. To an outside observer, I looked like a man who had found his success. It was in 2008, four years after my travels to Tibet and Mount Kailash, where I first learned about the mind-bending qualities of yak butter tea. There was a time when I wore size 46 pants and weighed more than 300 pounds, but that was behind me. After failing at every diet there was, I had invented a new one and had lost most of the weight I wanted to lose. Id pushed myself into good physical condition. I was busily learning about ways to hack the body, seeking out new methods to radically enhance my energy, my abilities, and my longevity. I had already begun developing the concept for Bulletproof Coffee, the company I would start a couple years later.

Outside appearances are not what truly define us, however. On the inside, I was dealing with unsatisfied cravings in many different forms. I felt regular pangs of hunger, along with distracting yearnings for cookies, chips, and other low-quality foods. I would give in to those impulses at times and then quickly regret it. I was maintaining my weight, but I was not feeling in control of my body. I had worked hard on my personal development and extracted myself from a bad, self-destructive relationship. I now had a loving wife and a new baby. Here, too, though, my inner self told a starkly different story. I was not at peace. All my life I had wrestled with loneliness and had made some progress. Even in my seemingly idyllic circumstances, that sense of emptiness was always lurking.

At the time I was managing my life, but that was not enough. What I was searching for was a path to becoming bulletproofto finding the unshakable inner strength that would let me become the master of all that I am, including the cravings for things that werent good for me. (The idea of becoming bulletproof later inspired my book and my company of the same name.) That search was what brought me to the shaman. I wanted to confront true hunger, to the point where I could free myself from food and all the ways it occupied my mind. Theres no way to fail at fasting if youre alone in the desert! I also wanted to work through my loneliness by facing down the kind of isolation that comes only by completely removing yourself from human contact.

So I walked into a cave in the Arizona desert and away from the rest of the world. For four solitary days I consumed only water and maybe a little Sonoran dust. By the time I walked back out, I had experienced a fast that changed my life. By reading this book, you have just taken the first step toward changing yours, too.

The needs that drove me to my journey were unique to me, but they were also rooted in the kinds of universal human challenges that we all face. In my case, I grew up as a fat kid. I eventually learned that I had been exposed to toxic mold that triggered Hashimotos thyroiditis, a condition in which the bodys immune system attacks the thyroid, but I didnt find that out until I was in my twenties. All I knew at the time was that I didnt look like the kids I admired; with my teenage man boobs, I certainly didnt look the way I wanted to.

If you struggle with your weight, and especially if you struggled with your weight when you were young, its hard not to feel judged by other people. Add to that some early childhood trauma or schoolyard bullying, and there may be a part of you that always feels alone. A common coping mechanism is to develop an emotional addiction to food, to rely on eating to soothe the hard feelings. I say all this without a trace of self-pity, because I know that everyone who reads this book has gone through his or her own versions of these struggles, even if he or she has never been overweight. Almost everyone has some form of physical or psychological addiction to food. Maybe yours is candy. Maybe its beer. Maybe its bread and cheese; gluten and milk protein are both highly addictive. Or perhaps youre hooked on potatoes. Do you find it impossible to imagine life without French fries? Ive been there.

The point is, addictions and cravings are built into us, even if youve never had a problem with your weight. They are easily activated, and there is a trillion-dollar food industrywhat I call Big Foodthat is specifically designed to do just that. When youre bored, you eat. When youre feeling stressed, you eat. Millions of years of evolutionary selection have hardwired us with these responses, as fundamental as our fear that things with sharp teeth might try to eat us. I sometimes refer to the four Fs of survival: fear, food, the F-word that involves reproduction, and friends. Without food, you would never get to enjoy those last two Fs, which is why the thought of going without food triggers such an intense, deeply irrational reaction before you even have time to think about it.

All of those thoughts were going through my head back in 2008 as I greeted the shaman and steeled myself for what lay ahead. Without being aware of it, I believed that even a single day without eating could leave me helplessly out of energy, which made me a prisoner to food. Going four days without food seemed a biological impossibility. This is how almost everyone in todays society thinks. You can bet that if you ask ten people what would happen to them if they didnt eat for a day or two, nine of them will say, Id starve. They even believe those words.

By the time I emerged from the cave, Id started to realize that none of this is true. I came to recognize that theres a fundamental difference between hunger and craving. Hunger is a biological message, and it is something that you can control. Craving is a psychological need, and it is something that tries to control you. The truth is, you can go a long time without eating, and you wont suffer for it. In fact, you will thrive.

The Big Food industry has worked hard to convince you that craving and hunger are one and the same. If every craving means that youre about to starve, then you need to buy something to satisfy that craving immediately, right? And by a wonderful coincidence, Big Food is ready to take care of you with a candy bar that really satisfies and a thousand other processed drinks and snacks that shackle you to a relentless feeling of craving that subsides when you snack but never really leaves. The same dynamic plays out over and over every day, fooling us into thinking that we are prisoners to food. I wrote this book to help set you free and because no one wrote it for me when I was twenty-two and wearing size-46 pants.

The key to that freedom is fastingand learning how to do all styles of fasting without feeling pain, all the way from meal-skipping intermittent fasting to multiday fasts. What youll learn here contradicts almost everything people think about what fasting is and what it does. Intermittent fasting wont make you weak, and it wont cause you to starve. It also doesnt require any one particular diet or one particular schedule of fasting, although you will experience a lot fewer cravings with some diets. Fasting is a tool kit that helps you unlock biological resources hidden in your body, resources you probably never knew you had.