The Ultimate Guide to Dry Fasting - Advanced Basics and Physiology - Scorch Protocol - Part 3

Welcome back to the Dry Fasting Club. I'm Yannick Wolf, and today we're going to be doing the physiological effects, which is part three of the ultimate guide to dry fasting. This was supposed to be together with types of dry fasting under the... understanding dry fasting umbrella but it just became too much i had to split it up

So this part is going to be a deeper dive into mechanisms around dry fasting. Believe it or not, I'm not going to touch on everything because there's just so much, but I'm going to touch on ketosis and fat metabolism. muscle loss, electrolytes and water balance, dry fasting autophagy, cancer, antifungals, parasites, hormonal changes, body temperature, and immune function.

it's a lot if you want to understand dry fasting on a deeper level please study this chapter it's impossible for me to give you everything but hopefully this information will give you the raw tools to make your own connections

starting with ketosis and fat metabolism. Without food or water, the body rapidly enters ketosis, burning fat for energy and more efficiently than with water fasting alone. Okay, so dry fasting melts fat. But the problem is, does it keep it off? In most cases, aggressive dieting and fasting is not the best solution for fat loss. Because there's almost always an aspect of slowing down the metabolism. Here's a hint. Look into reverse T3 and what that means in the context of fasting.

Maybe it doesn't catch you on the first ones, but eventually you plateau and realize something is wrong. If you ever get stuck in a loop where you feel like you just need to keep fasting and fasting and fasting, that's your big clue. However, there are cases with severe obesity. where you just run out of options. Sure, you can always try metabolic strategies, but in many of these cases, you need a miracle, and dry fasting can provide that.

You just don't want to overdo it or jump into it without careful preparation. Dry fasting can be the shock needed to the body and especially the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the control center in the brain that plays a very important part in hormone regulation. The secret is that the hypothalamus often short circuits following very stressful events. Ding, ding, ding. No wonder doctors are often useless at helping you. But you have to remember that under all of these problems,

The metabolism is still the key, so the refeed needs to include carbs and be done smartly. Now let's get to the science. Like I said earlier, dry fasting melts fat. Don't believe me? This is the perfect opportunity to dive deeper into the dry fasting zebra finches study, where the researchers discovered the hydrating effect of fat breakdown.

The study is called increased fat catabolism sustains water balance during fasting and zebra finches. And the study showed us that the dry fasted zebra finches lost the most fat by a large margin. yet their tissues and organs remained similar or even better hydrated than the control group. What this means is that there was some mechanism that was keeping the dry-fasted birds hydrated.

right? They would have just dehydrated and died otherwise. The only logical conclusion was that fat breakdown was hydrating the body. In zebra finches specifically, dry fasting melts fat. But we have to remember, obviously we are not birds, so the rules are similar but not the same. However, fat molecules do have the same... catabolic pathways in birds and in humans, so naturally we do share some similarities, some similar mechanisms, including the way the body breaks down fat.

This means that the increased fat burn makes dry fasting possible. Remember, if you were to nibble on some snacks or have a sip of water during this dry fast, it would throw off a lot of the mechanisms and actually make it dangerous. It also means that we are still dehydrating on a dry fast, even though it's hydrating us a little bit, just not as quickly as if we had no hydrating effect from the fat cells. So that means no exercise other than light walking when it comes to dry fasting.

Now let's take a quick chemistry break. Let's look at how water plays a role in fat breakdown. If anybody ever asks you or they're like, no way you can use this information. A triglyceride, which is the fat molecule that we think of when we think of fat, is made up of one glycerol molecule and three fatty acid chains. When it's broken down, it actually uses up water. So you don't tell people that that.

part of the equation gives you water but once it's out actually gets broken down to glycerol and three fatty acids you get a fat oxidation reaction and we see it here with stearic acid but if we can basically simplify the fat oxidation the simplified reaction looks like this a fatty acid plus oxygen gives us carbon dioxide and h2o

You can read more about this on the Dry Fasting Club website under the article called How Much Water Does the Body Produce from Burning Fat During Fasting? In starvation-level ketosis, where you're breaking down... say 100 to 160 grams of fat per day. Wait, bear with me a little bit because we're going to go into a little bit of math and science just to make you understand.

how much water can actually be created on these fasts, and we're going to compare it to studies and science from water fasting. In starvation level ketosis, where you're breaking down about 100 to 160 grams of fat per day, This is common knowledge when it comes to prolonged water fasting. You'd produce about 110 to 180 grams of water, which is around half a cup. And this is based on the scientific...

calculation based on the reactions. With dry fasting you can expect almost double and maybe even triple this due to the much more extreme fat burn and deeper ketosis. Just remember this is why it's important to dry fast properly and not speed it up or slow it down. Experimenting with foods, drinks, or supplements while on a dry fast will slow down the adaptation, which is bad.

While exercising or sauna use will speed it up, which is also bad and potentially even worse. While on the topic of grams of fat, let's look at some data from George F. Cahill Jr. who's probably one of the most influential and knowledgeable water fasting researchers. Cahill's data shows us that obese subjects were losing about 0.3 to 0.9 kilograms of body weight per day in early water fasting. These numbers start stabilizing at about 0.2 to 0.3 kilograms per day.

with most of that being fat after the initial water loss. So early on, you're losing a lot of water and we know this, we get this in both water fasting and dry fasting. But then when it tapers off, we can assume a lot of it is around fat burn. So at about 0.2 kilograms, which is 200 grams, we're going on the low end, we can assume approximately 75% of it is fat, so 150 grams.

and that's going to be water now the crazy part with dry fasting you can expect to lose up to five to ten pounds in the first 36 hours which is 2.3 to 4.5 kilograms And then you can expect to stabilize body weight at around one kilogram per day. This is the normal dry fasting stabilized weight loss. One kilogram per day. It's pretty nuts. You can compare that to the 0.3.

kilograms on water fasting. This indicates there's an approximate 3x increase compared to water fasting. This also correlates once again with the common saying that dry fasting is three times stronger than water fasting. We basically say that dry fasting also burns three times the amount of fat compared to water fasting.

The problem, once again, is that it also has three times the negative impact on your metabolism. Like I always say, three times stronger, but also three times more dangerous. Okay, let's get back to the weight loss study. In this study, we saw some amazing things. A 33% reduction in fat from the dry fasted group. That's 33%. We're obviously not zebra finches like we said earlier.

But to show proof of more fat loss from dry fasting is a pretty big discovery. I try not to advocate for dry fasting for weight loss because it's a slippery slope and the danger is usually not worth it. However, I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't a fat melter. The problem lies with many people slacking on the preparation and understanding of dry fasting and then hurting themselves in the process.

Often teenagers and young adults seek drastic weight loss. These are reckless kids who don't know any better. The problem is that they cannot afford to suppress their growing metabolism. There's a reason I say that... the Dry Fasting Club is only for those that are 21 and up. I just wish kids and even their parents understood the importance of not messing with a growing body.

It's a delicate process. You should practice balance when it comes to diet and avoid processed foods and seed oils as your first step. Dry fasting and fasting in general for kids is not recommended and maybe as the absolute last resort, but there are so many other options to take first.

Alright, let's move on to muscle loss. During ketosis, muscle breakdown is slowed down. This effect is amplified by dry fasting. Alright, so ketosis is known as being muscle sparing. We have papers to back this up. The oversimplification is that the deeper the ketosis, the more muscle sparing it is. In one study, they showed that beta-hydroxybutyrate, the most common ketone during ketosis, suppresses leucine oxidation.

which is an amino acid associated with muscle breakdown. This gives us hints that muscle breakdown is slowed down. Alright, ketosis doesn't just spare muscle. It can enhance protein synthesis under certain conditions. We see this on things like the Ketovore or Carnivore diet. Relatively healthy individuals that go on this diet discover a sort of anabolic effect.

that they didn't get previously, even with a similar amount of protein. I've told many people that a high meat diet, high meat ketogenic diet, really does grow muscle and burn fat together. and gives a mini steroid-like effect. A majority of nutritionists and personal trainers will say that you can't build muscle while cutting, but the carnivore diet is a direct counter to this.

A similar effect occurs with dry fasting. You can cut harder and maintain better muscle. The problem lies in the refeed. You will slow down the metabolism much more through fasting. which means you may regain more weight when you start eating higher amounts of food again. The carnivore diet also slows down your metabolism, but this takes a much, much longer time because...

Protein does provide more glucose, easier than fat, and blunts the effect of total carb restriction, which is associated with fasting. So think of the carnivore diet as like a super mini version of fasting. Since we're getting all these clues pointing towards ketones being muscle sparing, we can extrapolate this towards dry fasting. Dry fasting has ketosis that occurs on day 1, whereas water fasting can take up to day 3 to really get into ketosis.

Dry fasting also has deeper ketosis because it adds the element of dehydration-induced ketosis. So all in all, dry fasting is much more muscle-sparing than water fasting. The question is how fast can you get back to maintenance calories while not causing digestive damage from rushing the refeed? The refeed period is when you will accrue the most muscle loss.

To balance this problem, you want to limit the length of your dry fasts. The most common recommendation is to refeed for 2x, so 2 times the length you dry fasted. When I provide recommendations, I actually usually recommend three times the length for safety and pro-metabolic practices. The idea is that the mass of ketones provides so much energy that we can lower the amount of energy, glucose, needed from amino acids, converting to glucose by gluconeogenesis during fasting.

Simplifying down even more, it means that fat burn is so high, you only need small amounts of glucose for glucose-reliant organs like the liver. which produces but does not significantly use ketones, red blood cells, which have no mitochondria, so they cannot metabolize ketones, and the brain, which can adapt to use ketones but still requires quite a bit of glucose. So you may be thinking, Wouldn't that mean that water fasts should also be muscle sparing?

You'd be correct, except that you never enter as deep ketosis compared to a dry fast because you don't get the added ketone explosion that dehydration packs on top of everything else. Because ketosis is not as deep and you're not eating any protein, there is an increased amount of muscle being broken down on a water fast.

You can read more about this on the Dry Fasting Club website under the article called How Much Muscle Will You Lose on a Dry Fast? Alright, moving on to electrolyte and water balance.

The lack of water can disrupt electrolyte levels, which are crucial for muscle function, heart health, and nerve signaling. This makes careful management post-fast essential. Alright, the first part is going to talk about low-carb diet and fasting dehydration. by electrolytes and glycogen. So low carb ketogenic diets, just like fasting, are also known for causing dehydration. Dehydration is closely related to electrolyte imbalance.

This is one of the reasons why preparing with a low carb diet is like running mini marathons before the big ultra one, the big ultra fast. You prepare the body to adapt to fat burning, mild dehydration, and slight hormonal changes. When you are working on increasing your metabolism, you will be dehydrated as your body needs to readjust from its low water baseline. While you don't want to over-hydrate the first few days of the refeed,

aka watch out for edema, you need to actively increase water consumption over the following weeks. Now, low-carb diets and fasting cause dehydration because of four main things. lowered insulin levels, glycogen depletion, ketone excretion, and electrolyte imbalance. And I'm going to talk about each one of these. The first one was lowered insulin levels. Normally, insulin stimulates sodium reabsorption in the kidneys.

When carbohydrate intake is reduced, insulin levels drop, leading to decreased sodium reabsorption. And there's an article here called Insulin increases sodium reabsorption in diluting segments in humans. This is the main link to low-carb practitioners swearing by electrolytes and salting everything.

Your body is actively trying to drop sodium and you are constantly fighting it by dumping sodium on top. Think of it like a bucket of salt with a hole in the bottom. Alright, number two is glycogen depletion. The other reason why it causes dehydration. Carbohydrates are stored as glycogen in muscles and the liver, with each gram of glycogen being bound to 3-4 grams of water.

On a ketogenic diet, glycogen stores are rapidly depleted over time as the body shifts to fat burning, aka releasing this water. This glycogen depletion happens even faster on a fast. so it's very common to drop a lot of water weight in the first few days. This can be seen more often in people with big glycogen stores, like those on regular or high carb diets.

A long-term ketogenic dieter or someone who fasts excessively may not see this drop. Are you connecting the dots? If you're seeing more than three pounds dropping per day, a lot of that is water weight. Once it stabilizes, you should see approximately half a pound on a water fast and one and a half pounds on a dry fast. Notice the 3x ratio appearing again. The third thing...

for dehydration is ketone excretion. In ketosis, the body produces ketones, two main ones, which is acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate. which are excreted through urine. Your body needs to use extra water to flush the ketones out, which also speeds up dehydration. This is why there are many recommendations of drinking a lot of water while on the ketogenic diet. You have to remember that it affects different people differently. You can try to simplify this down to metabolism.

Those with a stronger metabolism will need much more water, because the whole system is running quicker, producing more ketones and dehydrating you much quicker. Adaptation to this diet usually means a slowing down of processes, which slows down glucose-based energy production. Eventually, it also slows down the ketone production.

And in the process, slows down water loss as well. And that was a hint towards why adapting to fasting usually means slowing down your metabolism. And the last one for dehydration is electrolyte imbalance. All of these mechanisms above lead to electrolyte loss and imbalance. Electrolytes are important for water retention and pH balance, so it's very common to recommend electrolyte supplementation. However, this is never a cure.

for the electrolyte imbalance. It's just a temporary stopgap measure. The tricky part is that if your body is struggling to hold onto these electrolytes naturally, piling them in won't fix the root issue. It could just create new imbalances or mask symptoms, leaving you feeling off instead of feeling truly stable. That's another reason why I do not advocate for lifelong keto dieting. If you want true health, you will need to get your body

to the point where it can stay in balance and harmony regardless of what macronutrients you eat. Okay, on the topic of electrolyte and water balance, we're also going to touch on liver flushing. And colon cleanses. So electrolyte balance is the main reason why you want to do liver flushing a day or two before the fast. Talk about this more in the preparing for dry fasting section, part four. And you do this to allow yourself a day or two of rebalancing your electrolytes.

It's also the reason why you don't do long water fasts and then convert them into dry fasts because the water fast throws off your electrolytes, which gets further thrown off by dry fasting. So a good strategy for the cleansing is to... do a liver flush a day early, followed by a liquid diet to avoid carbs and anything else, sorry, fiber and anything else sitting in your digestive system.

So think juicing or if you're low-carb, things like kefir, bone broth, and low-carb juices without the pulp. Okay, sodium in baking soda is another important one. Hormones also play a role with electrolyte balance. There is a different mechanism and a much more aggressive aldosterone and cortisol hormone increase on a dry fast. Aldosterone is known as the water balance hormone. If it goes up, the body holds onto sodium, which causes water retention.

But it really holds onto sodium after a dry fast. Knowing this, it becomes critical not to have lots of sodium during the refeed. Sodium usually means salt or sodium chloride. But what people don't realize is that this includes baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate. Avoiding baking soda goes against advice you might hear from other dry fasting practitioners like August Dunning. During fasting your kidneys adjust to hold on to more bicarbonate.

And when you add carbs back in, this effect gets even stronger, raising your blood's alkalinity further. And you can check this out in a paper called Glucose-induced alkalosis in fasting subjects. This is the reason why most dry fasters should not break their dry fasts with baking soda. But it's also the reason why you might hear conflicting advice. Low-carb dry fasters can get away with it.

In fact, it may even be beneficial. If you're not eating carbohydrates during the refeed, you don't get this natural reversal of the acidity. It would make sense that low-carb refeeders feel better with baking soda. And on the other side, high-carb low-fat refeeders will actually induce metabolic alkalosis.

as defined in the research paper I mentioned. Which means that if you refeed correctly, according to the Scorch protocol with carbs, you should not add baking soda because you might make your blood too alkaline. This can also be compared to why some very low carb refeeders swear by using electrolytes when breaking the fast, as opposed to the normal advice of avoiding salt. It often comes down to the dietary glucose component. In a perfect world, your refeeds will always include carbohydrates.

which means you need to avoid salt and avoid baking soda when breaking your fast. I give both sides of this because I want you to have as many tools in your arsenal as you can so you can make better choices and because a big portion of dry fasters come from low-carb communities. And to make matters or make things even more complicated, baking soda seems to be really good when you're preparing for a dry fast. The dry fast will put you into an acidic state no matter what.

Using a little bit of baking soda in advance will counter some of that acidity and may be beneficial as a prep. To keep things really simple, following the Scorch protocol, baking soda before a dry fast equals good. Baking soda after a dry fast equals bad. Usually. You can read more about why I do not agree with adding baking soda during the refeed on the Dry Fasting Club website. The article is called Why I Don't Fully Agree with the Phoenix Protocol by August Dunning.

All right, cellular autophagy. This is an important part. I know we touched on this before, but this one's going to be a little bit deeper. Dry fasting might enhance autophagy more than other fasting methods due to the stress on the body. prompting it to recycle damaged cells and proteins at a higher rate. Dry fasting also introduces a new type of superautophagy called hyperosmotic autophagy. Okay, so we touched on autophagy earlier.

But this time we dive into the secrets of dry fasting autophagy. The secrets lie in hypertonic, hyperosmotic, stress-induced autophagy. That's just a big word for dehydration autophagy. So what's so good about it? This autophagy seems to occur without the need to activate the ULK1 autophagy pathway. Amazing. What's the ULK1 autophagy pathway? I know it gets a little technical, but bear with me.

ULK1 is a protein that gets activated when your cells are under stress, as you can see in this image. It needs AMPK. Probably heard of AMPK. AMPK goes up when your body senses that it's going into starvation. So it's a caloric restriction sensing enzyme. It senses the fasting state and it activates. So it's what starts the whole beneficial part about fasting in all of us. Now let's look at it from the other side. When you eat a lot of food, it suppresses AMPK.

So AMPK goes down, and with that, it promotes its polar opposite to go up. Polar opposite is mTOR. Think of the AMPK mTOR association as kind of like a seesaw. When one goes up, the other goes down, and vice versa. So the crazy thing about dry fasting is that the dehydration aspect of dry fasting triggers this type of autophagy. the type of autophagy that does not rely on the AMPK pathway. And why is that important? Did you know that the herpes virus...

maybe even similar to the COVID virus, are known to be able to hijack autophagy pathways. And just so you know, almost everyone in the world has some type of herpes virus laying dormant inside of them. This means that if you suffer some form of latent viral reactivation, regular short water fasting is not going to put much of a dent into these issues. However,

Dry fasting adds this extra autophagy into the mix. It's like a magically customized autophagy bullet made specifically for some of these viruses that try to dodge our immune systems. There are some remarkable stories of people healing their herpes with really long fasts. I say fasts because you hear these stories on really long water fasts too. By really long, I mean those 21 to 30 day water fasts.

I do believe that once you get to 21 days of water fasting, you do activate some of this hyperosmotic autophagy that normally comes just from dry fasting. So what does this all mean? It means that this dehydration, hyperosmotic autophagy is probably the key, and you may need to do multiple really long fasts. By long ones, I mean 7-9 day dry ones or 30 day water fasts.

Yes, you might want to look into going to retreats for this because it's really difficult to get it right on your own. You've got the option of going to something like Sergei Filanov's retreats or Michel Deladouille's retreats. Jeune Sec retreats. Okay, so with this deeper microtubule restructuring autophagy that bypasses the ULK1 pathways, you get autophagy that viruses have not coevolved to hijack.

That's the bread and butter of dry fasting autophagy. But I would just warn you in advance that you should be pretty sure you're dealing with persistent viral outbreaks before going into these long fasts. Leave them as kind of a last... ditch effort. 80% of people with chronic illness don't need to do more than a few five-day dry fasts with the correct refeeding, correct immune system adjustments, and correct hormone therapy if required.

This is enough to heal you and this is where you should start. If you need help navigating the starting points, you can always book a call with me. So what does all of this mean? Dry fasting under 5 days might increase herpesvirus multiplication, while going over 5 activates the dehydration autophagy mechanisms that herpes can't hijack.

Otherwise, you really need the antiviral strategies and understanding that we're banking on things like resetting the HPA axis and activating stem cell regeneration. More so than just trying to nuke the persistent viral issues when doing fasts. So remember, over five days we're nuking. And under five days, we're more focusing on regular autophagy, a little bit of hyperosmotic, and mostly on stem cell regeneration. I have a side note here.

Three-day dry fasts with fast-acting metabolism might minimize immune suppression and minimize regular autophagy and do less herpes multiplication.

t3 supplementation while speeding up water loss and ulk1 independent autophagy okay moving on to cancer uh just a quick note on it basically This protocol does not address cancer. This protocol is not recommended for cancer patients. If you want to discuss cancer and your situation when it comes to fasting, please book a call with me. I may post my recommendations on a separate post one day.

I just want you to be aware that there is a thing called the refeeding state in all types of fasting where your cancer suppressing genes are essentially off or very suppressed. So there are three states described in recent research paper. The three states are the fed state, which is like the normal state, the fasted state, which can also be a keto state, and the refeed state.

which is X amount of days after you broke the fasted state. You want to be aware of this when you choose the right strategies and things like avoiding meat during the refeed state.

and only resume once the body is back to normal hormonal balance and safely back in the fed state. You should really check out this article when you are thinking about fasting and trying to understand what I mean by suppressing the... cancer suppressor genes in a nutshell these findings reveal that fasting and refeeding represent two distinct metabolic states as well as there is a fine line between fast refeeding driven

stem cell proliferation, and tumor formation. So my recommendations revolve, when it comes to cancer, revolve around strengthening the thymus with extracts or peptides. water fasting, and improving insulin resistance. I have a quick start guide for the thymus peptides in the Miro board on the website. Antifungals

Antifungals are drugs that fight fungal infections by attacking parts of the fungus, like a key component in their cell wall. They are critical in treating opportunistic infections that can complicate recovery from severe chronic illnesses. Okay, so antifungals help healing by stopping sneaky fungal problems, kind of like yeast overgrowth or mold infections. And you can think of it like candida or others.

These things can take advantage of a worn-out immune system, making recovery smoother and lowering the chance of serious setbacks. If you have symptoms of itchiness, weird skin conditions, a white tongue, and you've been dealing with a chronic illness, there's a good chance there's some fungal issues.

In general, healthy immune systems deal with the fungal problems without letting them get a foothold and get worse. But chronic illnesses and suppressed metabolisms mean that there are openings for them to jump in and take hold. Once taken hold, it's very difficult to get them out, and they can even slow your recovery by a lot.

If you don't have many symptoms, but do think you might have some, for example, Candida on your tongue, because you have a white tongue, you can start with herbals for antifungals and progress to something like Nystatin, like a swish and gargle antifungal. fungal that's very probably the most mild of the medications followed by something like fluconazole and maybe if none of these work and you really do have symptoms of fungus you can go so far as starting an itraconazole

So this is something you would bring up with your doctor. Please explore this a little deeper if you think this might apply to you. Also... Before we move on, keep in mind this. The 9-day dry fasts are known for nuking the pathogens. This includes fungals. This is one of the miraculous benefits of the long dry fasts, so keep that in mind. However...

Normally, revving up the metabolism and fixing the immune system, which includes the thymus, is still a requirement no matter what you do. And in many cases, the Scorch protocol will be enough.

But for the worst cases where it doesn't work, I may recommend a dry fasting retreat. Okay, moving on to parasites. Parasites are organisms that live in or live on or in a host, often causing harm. Dry fasting has been explored by some as a way to potentially weaken or eliminate them.

depriving the body of water and nutrients creates a hostile environment for parasites. Okay, so parasites are dealt with very efficiently through the longer fasts, but many people get a bit neurotic about the whole parasite concept. Many people worry that they have parasites when the symptoms are related to something else. I'd say that 9 times out of 10, someone worries that they have parasites, but they're hyperfixating on the wrong thing.

Don't get me wrong, doing an anti-parasite cleanse once a year makes a lot of sense, but a dose of ivermectin and an extended dry fast should put most of your worries to rest. How does fasting help? Well, you can check out this research paper that looked at water-fasted pigs and their parasitic loads. This is an extract. Pigs fasted for 10, but not for...

So pigs that fasted for 10 days but not for 6 days had decreased numbers of Parasite 1 and Parasite 2. at slaughter versus controls, and worms were found in further distal locations in the gastrointestinal tract. Fasting for both 6 and 10 days significantly lowered the fecundity of both worm species, meaning their reproductive capacity. So what does this mean? 10 days of water fasting severely lowered parasite load.

that was powerful six days didn't that means that you need more but the six days did lower reproduction rate meaning that over time the six days will still lower parasite numbers in your body We can assume that a dry fast is more powerful, right? And starts autophagy and deep ketosis much quicker. How much does that lower the number though? We don't really know.

we don't have the studies but to be safe let's say that a five-day dry fast probably helps lower the amount compared the five-day versus a six-day water but If you really want to clear it the way the 10-day water did, maybe a 7-9-day dry fast is required. But let's be clear, fasting by itself will probably not get rid of all your parasites. That's why it's important to cover the angle with an antiparasitic.

The Scorch protocol recommends one or two doses of ivermectin a week before your fast. If your doctor already put you on ivermectin and you're doing something like daily ivermectin for long COVID, you obviously don't have to worry about this. You can read more about parasites on the Dry Fasting Club website under the article The Secret of Fasting for a Parasite Cleanse.

All right, we are getting closer to the end. Next one is hormonal changes. Reduced insulin levels, increased growth hormone, and changes in cortisol and thyroid can impact energy, stress response, and recovery. This is where most of my energy was dedicated to in the last two years. The most important discoveries research and focus on dry fasting and hormones. A lot of the magic of dry fasting is due to the adrenal glands.

The adrenal glands are the fire that drives the dry fasting magic. But there's another gland that is almost just as important, the thyroid. The thyroid hormones are the key to health on a dry fast. They are the fuel that allows the fire to burn strong. If you run out of fuel, the fire will burn out. I need you to understand this concept.

Weak adrenals mean you shouldn't even consider fasting, but a weak thyroid means that your dry fast just won't be as good. This is a very deep conversation and why the most important tests that I want to see from anyone asking for personal guidance are a full thyroid panel and a salivary cortisol test. The thyroid panel has to include free T3, reverse T3 and antibody testing for Hashimoto's,

But not everyone with thyroid and adrenal issues can even be identified through blood tests. Keep in mind, my absolute specialty is in dealing with these people whose blood tests come back normal but are completely sick. Is that you? Normal blood tests, but something is definitely wrong. You experience all the hallmarks of chronic fatigue syndrome, but doctors say it's all in your head. These are the hardest cases and the most rewarding to heal because I was one of them.

An important note but one that requires more time to discuss is that producing extra reverse T3 during fasting is kind of an energy conservation adaptation by the body. This should not be confused with the hypothalamus short-circuiting, which is another thing. These are two distinct problems. even though sometimes they may be related. There are many strategies to attempt one by one, but if nothing works, eventually you might have to explore things like active thyroid hormone therapy.

Please explore the Miro board on the far right section, which is dedicated to restoring metabolism and fixing the thyroid with mono T3 therapy. So for example, there are studies showing that supplementing with active T3 and fasted rats can prevent skeletal muscle breakdown.

And this is something that I did experiment with because I am a bit of a guinea pig to all of this for a long time. But I think it can be dangerous. Why? Because as autophagy and dehydration ramps up, your detox pathways get clogged. Speeding everything up with T3 while deeper into a fast is a risky experiment because it goes against nature's adaptation to fasting. Think about it, if you artificially speed up metabolism and with it detox, you risk running into even more clogging.

The mechanisms of adaptation to fasting force reverse T3 to be created, and by supplementing T3 during a fast you go against how your body has evolved. However, there are some very interesting theory crafting and ideas around using it in very short water fasts. Okay, let's get back to the adrenal hormones, which are the keys to the dry fast.

Cortisol and aldosterone are the two hormones that we worry about the most right before, during, and right after the dry fast. I have articles on these hormones and even a few YouTube videos so check them out. Usually, you only hear about adrenaline and cortisol when you think of the adrenal glands, but aldosterone is also a very important one in dry fasting.

The aldosterone hormone is critical to sodium retention and electrolytes in your kidneys, which means it plays one of the most important roles in water balance in the body. If anyone is suffering from HPA axis dysfunction, which is the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, which might manifest in hypocortisolism or hypoaldosteronism, which is low cortisol or low aldosterone. They are not good candidates for dry fasting.

If you have been diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency, dry fasting can be very dangerous. This is actually very rare, but something to keep in mind. And I use a litmus test for most people. For example, I ask them to do a few things that can tell me if they are good candidates for dry fasting.

And based on their reactions, I'll know. One of the litmus tests is, for example, how you react to nicotine patches. Normally, they should make you feel better, give you more energy. If you react badly to them... It may be a clue that you are not a great candidate for dry fasting, and your first steps need to be adrenal rehabilitation. And another quick note on cortisol levels on a dry fast.

Cortisol starts to rise but really jumps after the third day of a dry fast. It stays elevated for a long time after a dry fast and much longer the longer you fast it. If you dry fast for five days, you can expect elevated cortisol levels for another five days afterwards. And this is science-based. There is a study where they tracked... In fact, hormone levels may take 1-2 months to fully regulate back to normal following a long dry fast.

This is one of the reasons that it is recommended to wait two months before taking blood tests, especially if you do anything over seven days. If you do it too quickly, and get that blood test too quickly after the fast, it will often lead to a lot of stress and difficult to understand results. All right, I know this was a lot, and we're on the last one. Body temperature and immune function.

The body might slightly elevate its temperature to conserve water, which can also boost immune function through increased white blood cell activity. Okay, so body temperature, immune function, we're going to break this down into three parts. The first one is what is the dry fasting heat and how does it relate to temperature? So this is not your cells turning into furnaces. You hear that a lot.

this is related to dehydration and heat dissipation there is this misconception spread through the dry fasting community that this is part of detoxing and that yourself cells are burning bad stuff kind of like a furnace The problem is that this is the way you would simplify things for a toddler. When you dehydrate, your body loses the ability to release heat because it doesn't have enough water. Kind of like a faulty radiator.

Not only do you lower the ability to sweat, your body starts to accumulate the heat. Then adrenaline and cortisol keep rising which increases your heart rate and generates even more heat. You're not sweating due to your body trying to conserve water, and you're not moving heat to the extremities as well because your blood is getting thicker.

I hope this makes sense and paints the picture The second thing is the body temperature testing on a dry fast The problem with too much fasting will be that your metabolism will slow down much quicker due to the fasting than if you were on a carnivore diet only. The best way to track or to keep track of your metabolism is to take a temperature reading right when you wake up, then right after breakfast, maybe 30 minutes after you eat.

and also you can go ahead and do another one in the afternoons if you want more data you should also check your pulse too so your heart rate you want to have both a reputable so a good digital and a good classical thermometer for this usually the recommendation is a good classical thermometer because the digital ones can be all over the place This way you can watch your metabolism in real time without the need for blood tests.

This information is also an important factor in the Scorch protocol because it helps diagnose problems with the metabolism and helps me advise the correct next steps. You want your temperature to be around 98.6 Fahrenheit or 30. 36.6 Celsius. If it's lower, we're definitely dealing with an issue. You also want to use a medical grade classical thermometer, like I mentioned earlier. And just remember that...

Your temperature should actually rise higher than this later in the day, especially after you eat. And the last part of this section is going to be the immune system and talking about how it reboots after 72 hours. We talked about the immune system in the first part. So when we talked about why combine the carnivore diet with dry fasting, but in this, let's add on a little bit more here.

A big immune system reboot is often correlated to a 72-hour fast. And there's a paper called When Fasting Gets Tough, the Tough Immune Cells Get Going or Die. But we don't talk a lot about the immune suppression enough. There's a drastic reduction in circulating immune cells during fasting. Some studies have shown that you only have 10% of your monocytes.

like one of your first line of defense, active after a 24-hour water fast. So the rest, the 90%, usually retreat to the bone marrow to hibernate. This is serious information. You need to account for this upon breaking your fast, especially on the first day, and especially if you have a chronic illness that may have some viral reactivation component to it. There is a pretty...

quick reversibility of this immune suppression that occurs within the first 24 hours of refeeding. But because your immune system is suppressed, It makes a lot of sense to recommend things like boiling or eating pasteurized food early on to avoid any pathogenic contamination, any bacteria, any stuff that your immune system will have to exert extra effort to deal with.

You want to give your body nutrients that it doesn't need to worry about and that it doesn't need that hibernating immune system to tackle. So what fits the bill? We have things like vegetable broth and Eastern European fruit compote because these are both boiled. After the first day, you can start bringing in kefir for that probiotic boost, but you still want to keep most things cooked and pasteurized for a few days.

You also need to understand that if you have herpes, Epstein-Barr virus or any other virus that causes outbreaks when your immunity drops, you're going to need an antiviral protocol at the minimum. There are lots of possible complications here, especially for people with already compromised immune systems.

There are so many people who have had a bad experience with fasting because they did not understand that their herpes infections needed to be managed properly for the refeed. The SCORCH protocol is pretty detailed on the antiviral protocol. And there are many strategies to build back your immune system in between fasts, like thymus peptides. That's basically it. We're done with this section. It's been a really long slog. Hopefully you found a lot of good information here.

Make sure to check out the Dry Fasting Club website. Make sure you check out the Miro board. That's where the magic is. And the next chapter, part four, is going to be about preparing for a dry fast. This means tips, tricks, cleanses. food recommendations, and more. Probably the part that most people want to listen to. Make sure you get your notebooks out and keep up. Thanks for sticking around and good luck on your dry fasting journey.