Watch Time – 5 minutes 36 seconds

Watch as cardiologist Dr. Jack Wolfson shares why intermittent fasting helps your heart health.

By watching this video you will learn:

• The heart health benefits of intermittent fasting
• The three common ways to fast
• Common fasting schedules
• Intermittent fasting dos and don’ts

Transcript of this video:

Hey, it’s Dr. Jack Wolfson, cardiologist, and I want to talk to you about Intermittent Fasting is Heart Healthy.

Intermittent fasting is sweeping the nation. Whether you are on Paleo or you are going Vegan, or you are on Keto, intermittent fasting is heart healthy.

And let me tell you a little more about it.

So, fasting does not mean eating fast food. That’s obvious. And here these guys were from biblical times and they understood the importance of fasting even back then.

In the Jewish religion they do a 24 hour fast on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, where they drink no water and eat no food.

I’m not into that and I will tell you the best ways to fast as we come up.

But Ramadan, different religions have different fasting methods, so it’s been done for millennia.

Cardiac benefits of intermittent fasting.

I know this is exhaustive but that’s the cool thing is that fasting does so many fantastic things to your body.

And let’s just kinda run down some of these things.

Weight loss. Lowers blood pressure. Lowers inflammation. Improves blood sugar. Improves lung function.

The bottom left there. Decreased smooth muscle cell proliferation. So, coronary artery disease has to do a lot with those muscle cells inside of the arteries actually expanding and lead to more inflammation and more recruitment of unhealthy cells. So, let’s avoid that.

In the center, lowers total cholesterol. Lower LDL cholesterol. Increase LDL size, which is good. Increased HDL number and the key here, HDL function improves with intermittent fasting. HDL function is really one of the holy grails to cardiac health.

And then of course, lower triglycerides.

Increase heart rate variability. Top right. Heart rate variability – the higher your heart rate variability is, the lower your risk of dying. That’s good news.

More markers and hormones that have to do with inflammation. Parasympathetic tone helps keep your heart rate nice and slow. Balances off sympathetic and parasympathetic balance.

Increased endothelial function. When the lining of your blood vessels, those cells that line them functions better, blood flows better including to those areas that are so important to men. Wink-wink.

And also to women. Wink-wink.

So, decreased arterial stiffness. Those are the benefits of intermittent fasting.

Now talking about male and female hormones, fasting interestingly enough lowers testosterone, lowers sexual desire, and lowers frequency of intercourse. Not a lot of literature on this but I guess I would say the most likely reason is that if you are fasting, your body is in repair mode, it’s in a mode where it is biologically it would know that the answer is not “hey, I’m looking to find a mate and have intercourse or procreate. I need to find food. I’m hungry.”

And that is the beauty of intermittent fasting. It allows just a total resetting of the system, of the body.

So, there’s different types of fasts. I’m not going to go into everything here. But I think these are kind of the main ones.

Water fasting. Juice fasting. And as I mentioned before, there is religious-type fasts.

I think water and juice fasting are a great way to go.

There is three options that I would start people off at.

Maybe you kinda want to ease your way into it with a 16 hour fast. So, in that scenario you would skip breakfast for example. Therefore, you’d go from dinner the night before and then you would not eat until lunch the following day. If you skip the dinner you have lunch and then you skip the dinner and your next meal would be breakfast.

I like breaking any type of fast with a Greens Drink. Either a fresh greens or a reconstituted organic powdered drink.

Twenty-four hour fast. This is certainly very common. Dinner to dinner. So, Saturday night is your last meal. You do not have breakfast on Sunday, lunch on Sunday and then you have dinner on Sunday night.

But my personal favorite is the 36 hour fast. Saturday night is your last meal. And then you have nothing all day on Sunday, nothing on Sunday night, and then finally you break it with a healthy Greens Drink on Monday morning.

Tips for fasting.

You’ve got to relax. You have to relax. No work. No stress. Light activity. You can go outside for a walk or maybe a mild bike ride but nothing heavy.

My favorite thing of course while fasting is massage. Massage. Massage.

Take a nap, if you would also. Take a nap is fantastic. That’s letter “e.”

Then, you want to drink quality water or the organic juice. Aim for one point five gallons of water per day. Just drink as much water and you are going to find that you want something, you’re used to eating something and you’re used to drinking so you are going to be thirsty and you’re going to be drinking a lot.

Plan on urinating a lot also during the night. It’s one thing that I find is that when I’m drinking a lot of water it obviously stands to reason that you urinate a lot. But certainly, at night time it really collects.

Otherwise, if you are juicing, once again this is not a diet, so you can drink as much fresh greens juice as you would like. You can make your own juice. You can buy the juice pre-packaged hopefully in glass and not plastic. You can use some kind of reconstituted powder.

So, that is my tips for fasting and heart healthy cardiac fasting, which is so tremendous for your heart health.

Talk with your doctor. Talk with your holistic provider. Send us an email. Let us know what you think over at TheDrsWolfson.com.