Fasting for True Healing: What Most Practitioners Are Missing

What if the key to unlocking deep cellular repair, reversing disease, and reclaiming your energy was... not eating? In this episode, Dr. Ritamarie sits down with world-renowned water fasting expert Loren Lockman to explore how fasting goes beyond trendy biohacks, tapping into our body’s built-in healing intelligence. 

From detox-resistant weight gain to reversing chronic conditions that seem “untreatable,” this conversation will challenge everything you’ve been taught about food, symptoms, and what it really means to heal.

What’s Inside This Episode?

  • Why fasting equals liberation

  • The shocking connection between hydration, mucoid plaque, and autoimmune symptoms

  • The truth about “healthy” people who never get sick and still die young

  • Why lean clients may benefit the most from extended fasting

  • How to determine if your client’s labs are missing early signs of deeper toxicity

  • When a 5-day fast isn’t enough and what’s really required for cellular repair

  • A simple blood pressure formula Loren uses to spot hidden dehydration

  • Incredible real-life healing stories from clients with migraines, paralysis, cancer, and chronic fatigue

Resources and Links:

Guest Resources and Links

Connect with Loren Lockman on:

Grab his free Gift: email Loren Lockman at faster1still@gmail.com to receive his free ebook Ancient Secrets of Healing

Guest Bio:

Loren Lockman, age 64 is a 38-year vegan and 33.5 year raw vegan. Loren has been a health coach since 1987 and began supervising water-only fasts in 1996, running the world’s largest dedicated water-only fasting center for 29 years. He’s guided nearly 12,000 people through water-only fasts averaging 26 days with consistently amazing transformations. A Reiki Master, Certified Permaculture Instructor, body surfer, poet, frisbee and backgammon player, Loren is passionate about helping people become their very best selves.

 

Transcript

 

Dr Ritamarie

Our cells already know how to repair, renew, and restore. All we need to do is step out of the way. And when we do, we realize that fasting isn't about deprivation, it's about liberation. Liberation from cravings, from chaos, from chronic illness. 

 

Today, we're going to deep dive into the ancient healing art of fasting. It's an approach that's been practiced for thousands of years but has only recently been rediscovered by modern science.

 

From autophagy and stem cell regeneration to mental clarity and metabolic reset, fasting unlocks the power within us that food can sometimes keep hidden. And I couldn't think of a better guide for this conversation than my guest today, Loren Lockman.

 

So let me tell you a little bit about Loren. He's age 64, and at age 64 has been a 38 year vegan and has been following a raw vegan diet for 33 and a half of those years. He's been a health coach since 1987, and he began supervising water only fasts in 1996. For the past 29 years, he's run the world's largest dedicated water only fasting center where he's guided nearly 12,000 people through fasts, averaging 26 days with consistently profound transformation. 

 

Now you know why I invited him here to talk about fasting. Loren’s also a Reiki master. He's also a certified permaculture instructor, and he likes to body surf. He's a poet. He's a frisbee enthusiast and a backgammon player. So he's got a lot of skills and his knowledge about fasting is superb. 

 

So what my goal is for this presentation today, or this talk today, is to leave you as a practitioner, as a health coach, as a doctor, a nurse, whoever you are, with the knowledge to know when you have a patient or client that you're working with that needs the power of fasting. Loren would probably argue that everybody does, but how do you know when you want to be referring somebody to fasting and how it can be done safely and effectively. Without further ado, Loren, welcome. I'm so excited to have you here.

 

Loren Lockman (02:42)

Hey, Dr. Ritamarie, how are you? Good to see you.

 

Dr Ritamarie (02:48)

I'm really good, I'm really good. And you know, my beginnings in health actually started with fasting. Only back then in 1985, when I did my first fast, a 28 day water fast, it wasn't talked about much. And so whenever I did talk about it, I was accused of being, let's just say anorexic or having a food disorder, a eating disorder.

 

It wasn't popular back then. So when I talked about it later and started saying how that was my transforming moment, I would say, well, I did a cleanse. I did a detox kind of program. But now in the last, I don't know, six, seven years, fasting has become popular. And I would love to talk to you about it. I would love to share your experience. 

 

So how did you get into fasting? And then we'll go through, how do you do it safely? And what are the physiologic effects of fasting?

 

Loren Lockman (03:38)

Sure. Well, let me start with how I got started. Probably a common story with people who wind up doing things like this. I got very sick at 23. I got much worse with three years of medical care. I finally woke up at 26 and realized that medicine was just suppressing symptoms. I wasn't getting any better. I was getting much worse. I walked away. At that point, I didn't really know what I was going to do.

 

I tried everything else. I tried chiropractic, I tried homeopathy, I tried herbs, I tried everything I knew of, and nothing was really helping me. And I finally came across a book written by Arnold Ehret called Rational Fasting. And in this book, Ehret was talking about people going extended periods without food and you know, it sounded a little crazy to me, but at the same time it made some sense to me.

 

And I'd had a little bit of exposure to fasting. I'm Jewish but only on my parents' side. And so I grew up fasting one day a year. I knew I could do that. I literally thought, well, I'll try to. And I parked myself close to the refrigerator just in case, because I didn't really know if that was possible. I survived two days and then I did four days and eight days and 12 days. And I worked my way up until I was doing 21 days at a time. And it completely transformed my health and my life.

 

You may remember this from conversations way back when, but I was in commercial real estate, and I have a background in finance, and I was working in that field, but people who knew me would come up to me if they hadn't seen me for a while and say, “My God, you look amazing. What did you do? Could you help me, or could you help my spouse, or could you help my kid?” Right. That sort of thing. And so before long, I started coaching other people, helping people not with fasting, just with health in general.

 

Around the same time I wound up realizing that the diet I'd been eating my whole life maybe wasn't the healthiest thing in the world for me. And so I wound up making significant dietary changes as you've already said, first vegan and then raw vegan. And I've been living on a fruit-based diet now for 33 and a half years. I'll tell you, I went from being the sickest person I knew at 23 to 26 to not having been sick one single day in 38 years.

 

There may be people who think, well, you got good genes. Maybe. I've got six siblings. They all wear glasses. My vision is still better than 2020. My mother began to develop arthritis in her early 30s. There are four of us now in our 60s. Everybody's suffering from arthritis. My body works better than it did when I was 18. I don't think it has anything to do with genetics.

 

Dr Ritamarie (06:33)

I don't think it's genetic, and I don't think it's random, honestly.

 

Loren Lockman (06:36)

No, exactly. Genetics, I think we can agree, do play a role. They're a factor, but they're a much smaller factor than most people think they are. It's mostly about the choices we make.

 

Dr Ritamarie (06:47)

Much smaller. Absolutely. So it's said even amongst all the genetic geniuses, if there are any out there, that it's really 95 to 98% lifestyle. That the genetics, yes, make you more prone. It makes me more sensitive to cigarette smoke. It makes me more sensitive to some of the things I probably shouldn't be exposed to anyway, but I'm going to be more sensitive to it based on my genes.

 

Loren Lockman (07:11)

Exactly. Genes load the gun. Lifestyle choices pull the trigger. We've all heard this before. So for me, it allowed me to take my health to a whole new level. And I didn't really know what I was doing at the time. This was pre-internet. And so I didn't know there were places I could go. I didn't know anything about that. My guide was this dead guy. Right. And this book.

 

I made a lot of mistakes, but over time I figured things out and ultimately my health coaching clients were asking me to guide them through fasts. And by this point, I realized that there were places to go, but I wasn't really crazy about what I saw because most of them seemed way too institutional to me. 

 

As I'm sure you're aware, hospital patients who can see a tree from their bed heal on average of 15% faster than patients who can't see a tree. And this is just seeing a tree through your window, even though you're in an urban setting, right? And I wanted to create a place that was actually completely ensconced in nature. And so as you said, I ran that place for nearly 30 years. My last location where we spent the last 13 years, 37 acres of spectacular tropical paradise. It was amazing. Many people said it was the most beautiful place they'd ever seen. And I definitely think that being in that environment was a huge boon to healing. 

 

Now, having said that, about 15 years ago, I realized that there were many people, whether it was because of the cost of traveling, my clients so far have come from 156 countries. And so there are people coming from third world countries that just thought our prices were high for them. Plus they had the cost of travel. And so I began working with people remotely. And now I'm exclusively working with people remotely, I still see amazing results. It may not be the same depending on where you are, but it still offers the same basic opportunity to cleanse and heal. 

 

I think perhaps the most important piece for people to understand, and again, your audience is an intelligent, educated audience who knows much more than most people do. But it might be difficult sometimes to remember that healing and detoxification are biological processes. Right? 

 

Years ago I was in Belfast, Ireland, doing a full day seminar. And I said to the room, there's only one thing on this planet that can heal your body. And a hopeful voice from the back of the room said, you? I said, no, not me. It's your body. Only the body can heal itself. 

 

Fasting, which sounded crazy to me, still sounds crazy to many people today, 40 years later. But the bottom line is that of the roughly 25 million animal species, all of them instinctively lay down and stop eating if they're sick enough or badly enough injured. And the reason is very simple. Processing food takes a significant amount of energy. 

 

There's only estimates. I believe it's probably around 50% of our daily energy goes to processing food through the body, whatever the number is. It's a lot of energy. And so every other species instinctively stops eating so that all that energy can be shunted toward the processes of cleansing and healing, regeneration, et cetera. And so you said in the intro, I probably would recommend everybody. The truth is I've never seen anyone who doesn't benefit from this process.

 

And it's amazing because there's some data that shows that while it's incredible for people who have issues they need to heal, as you and I both did. People who are well might actually see a larger positive shift by fasting long enough and properly. If you've been on the planet, I don't remember exactly, hold your arm up, and I'm going to guess it's at least 35 at least. So.

 

Dr Ritamarie (11:24)

At least 35, yeah. Double that.

 

Loren Lockman (11:29)

When we've been on the planet for decades, even again, I know you've been very conscious for many years now, right? As have I, but I still spent nearly half my life making relatively poor choices, before I started shifting. Until we get the garbage out of the body, and it's not just from what we've purposely put in, but that's the biggest factor. 

 

We're living on an increasingly polluted planet. We're affected by Wi-Fi from everywhere. We're affected by cell phone towers, microwave signals from everywhere. But there was a study, I think 15, 20 years ago, where they looked at 75 persistent environmental toxins. And they took a statistically significant sample size, thousands of people in North America. These were things like PCBs, dioxins, et cetera, most of which have been outlawed for decades already in North America.

 

They found the average person had more than 50% of them in their bodies in measurable quantities. So there's a lot of stuff in there that doesn't belong. No matter how much exercise you do, or how good your diet is, or how well you sleep, or anything else, until we get the toxic stuff out of the body, we're never going to feel and function the way that we're capable of.

 

Dr Ritamarie (12:50)

Yes, and that sounds like from what you just said, it's not a one time deal to get the toxic stuff out, because we're going to go back and be exposed, right? Where the environment isn't changing.

 

Loren Lockman (13:04)

Well, it's a really good point. What I would say to that is that most people, if they've already been two, three, or more decades on the planet, probably need to fast two or three times for 21 days or more. And again, I know that sounds crazy to many people, 21 days without food. 

 

My average client fast is 26 days. My longest client fast was a young man from the UK, from London, who had stage four testicular cancer. He was morbidly obese. He was about five, six, two hundred and fifty pounds. He fasted for four and a half months on only water. OK, now I talk about water only fasting, and I'm not mincing words. So when people say, are they taking salt or electrolytes? No, it's water only, spring water only. That's all it is. Again, it sounds crazy to most people, because most people don't realize that our bodies are super intelligent.

 

Our kidneys' job is to get rid of everything the body doesn't want in the bloodstream while keeping what it does. So as long as we're not making the body exceptionally dehydrated, and we don't have to be dehydrated at all. 

 

Most people are starting off pretty dehydrated.So as long as we're not drinking too little water or drinking too quickly, because if we drink too quickly, the kidneys can't keep up and then we wind up losing some of the vital electrolytes. As long as we're not doing one of those two things, there's virtually no risk, if we're doing this properly, of creating an electrolyte problem. 

 

The length of the fast is really determined by the amount of reserves. And even that's a little bit surprising. I have many, many clients who come to me exceptionally lean, because they can't gain healthy weight.

 

In some cases, it's been diabetes, right? If they're running around with high blood sugar and often don't even know it. It's like they're on speed, and it's very hard to gain weight. So the woman who published, edited, and produced all of my videos on the old YouTube channel, I was hacked, and I've been locked out of it for two and a half years. But the last four years of that channel, we produced about three videos a week, and she did all that work for me. When she first came to me, I think it was eight years ago this past April. She's 5’7”. She weighed 88 pounds, and she did 21 days with no problem. Today, she's not a diabetic anymore. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (15:43)

Wow. And did she then lose more weight after, I mean, during a fast? Of course. 

 

Loren Lockman (15:55)

Well, everyone loses weight when you're not eating, of course. But here's what happens. This is the part that scares people and that people often don't understand. The average person in a 21 day fast, at least with my protocol, will lose 21 pounds. However, it's not a pound a day. The weight loss is front loaded. 

 

Most people are walking around with a lot of salt in the body the body can't get rid of. And as we release that salt, we release all the edema that the body's been holding to protect us from it. Right. So we need sodium and chloride, but we never need salt. I haven't personally consumed salt. I suppose every once in a while at a raw vegan restaurant, I might get some, but I haven't bought salt or put it in my own food for more than 40 years. We don't need it at all. We're meant to get all the nutrients we need from our food and from sunlight, et cetera. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (16:52)

Yeah, but the food people are eating is not supplying their nutrition, right? 

 

Loren Lockman (17:00)

No, there's no question. If you're eating the conventional commercial crap, you're going to wind up with issues. It became clear to me a long time ago, both from the standpoint of nutrients and also from the standpoint of toxicity, of safety, is you have to buy organic food wherever possible. And of course, it's not perfect. There are probably people that are paying bribes. But if it's not organic, 100%, we know it's loaded with poison and probably doesn't have a lot of nutrients in it. Right? You know, there's major issues, because when we spray the soil with pesticides and herbicides, we're killing the bacteria in the soil that allow the plants to convert inorganic minerals into organic ones. So the fruits and vegetables won't have the mineral content that they should. OK? When we're eating stuff that's been grown in healthy soil and picked at the right time, it does have all the nutrients we need. And again, we don't need to focus on this, but I'll tell you something that surprises most people. at 64, I haven't taken a single supplement in 33 years. I get everything I need from my food and sunlight.

 

Dr Ritamarie (18:12)

Interesting. So I have a number of things I want to pull apart from here, right? I want to start with having everybody understand the benefits, like what physiologically is happening during a fast. And then I have tons of other questions related to what you just said.

 

Loren Lockman (18:32)

Sure, sure. Well, let me start by saying that I can share what we know is happening. There are probably a lot of things we're not even aware of yet. The big one that people talk about is autophagy, as you mentioned before, which comes from the Greek self-eat. In fact, the word was coined, as you might know, by Japanese Nobel Prize-winning scientist Yoshinori Yasumi. He coined the term autophagy. He studied this process for probably 10 or 12 years. And what he determined was that it happens much more effectively and efficiently in what he said in starvation, in the absence of food. 

 

Okay. So when the body doesn't have to spend all that energy processing food, it's able to put energy into getting rid of the stuff that doesn't belong. And you said beautifully in your introduction, the body knows, I don't remember the exact words, but the body knows essentially what doesn't belong there, right?

 

So when we're fasting, it's able to get rid of the stuff that doesn't belong. And so we see tumors and all kinds of growths disappearing as people fast when they fast long enough and properly. Okay, so autophagy is a huge one, right? Because this is the body getting rid of all the stuff that's stuck in the body that doesn't belong there. Okay, we're detoxifying though on so many different levels. 

 

There's five primary channels of detoxification, and we're eliminating toxins through all of them. So it's interesting to see adults who've had beautiful skin for years developing acne as they fast. Now it usually goes away by the time they're done, but the body is using every channel, including the skin. Largest organ of detoxification, not typically the most active, right? We do most detoxification through the kidneys, and we see amazing things there.

 

The part that's probably most shocking, and it's controversial, many practitioners have been taught this isn't real, is the mucoid plaque. We see clients, virtually everyone, because almost all of my clients fast for 21 days or longer. It doesn't happen with very short fasts of 7, 10, 16 days maybe, but 21 days or more, if someone has gotten enough water throughout the process and done it properly, because that's important, too.

 

As I said before, we're going to see them eliminating pounds and pounds of old hard waste. And it's amazing what happens when that stuff is out of the body. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (20:50)

Is that during the fast or is it after they stop fast? After.

 

Loren Lockman (21:05)

That only happens for the average person, on day four of the refeeding process. Again, when they follow my protocol based on the quantities we're giving people, the types of things that they're eating on day four, most people are going to have their first problem. And I just had a client who fasted 30 days and did not have a bowel movement until day seven.

 

By the time they had their first bowel movement, they'd already eaten, let me think, 30 meals. OK, so, if there's no old hard material in there, why isn't this stuff leaving the body? OK, now, when it does leave the body, it's incredible what happens. Migraines that have been present for decades for people disappear. We had a client recently, 52 years old, who said to me on the fifth day of refeeding, last night I had the worst migraine I've ever had, and he'd been dealing with this for decades. This is why he fasted as long as he did. I think it was 26 or 30 days. I don't recall now. And he said to me, I had this horrific migraine and then I had a bowel movement and the migraine immediately disappeared. We see the same thing happening with things like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue.

 

So many issues, I believe, are tied to the presence of this material, because when it's in there and people say, well, yeah, but I've had colonics and enemas or or, we've looked and there's nothing there. We've had colonoscopies. It's not in the colon. Your colon is relatively straight, right? Starts at the ileocecal valve, comes up, gentle 90 degree turn, comes across gentle 90 degree turn 45 and then it's out. It's about the same length as your height.

 

But your small intestine is three and a half to four times longer. It's one third of the diameter. I'm six foot tall, so on my relatively long torso, in about 12 inches from the bottom of my stomach to ileocecal valve, there's some 20, 22 feet of small intestine. It's all twists and turns. This is where the stuff gets stuck. 

 

I had one case that was really fascinating because the man had had his entire colon removed. He had an ileostomy. Okay, so small intestine coming through the abdomen into a bag. He fasted with me twice without a colon, 42 days each. And each day, every single day of the fast, old hard material entered the bag from the small intestine. This is what's going on for everybody that has a colon too. 

 

It's going into the colon where it collects and builds up. Usually it becomes a bit hard to move again until someone starts eating. And usually it takes several days worth of food to move that out. But it's incredible. And it's amazing what happens. I don't remember. I think you have children, don't you? 

 

So I'm guessing, I mean, like most women, you probably peed a lot at night when you're pregnant. Right. You probably know the reason for that.

 

This happens for most women, because when they lay down the weight of the baby is sitting on the bladder. So it feels like it's full when it's not full. And that means you pee, but there wasn't much there. So an hour later you have to pee again. That's what happens. Well, the exact same thing happens when we're fasting and rehydrating this old material. 

 

I have a woman fasting with me now. She is about 60, in Maui, one of your favorite places on the planet. And she said to me, “I wake up five times a night to pee every night.” I said, well, there's only three possible reasons that that's happening. One, you're pregnant. I think we can probably rule that one out. Two,  your prostate's enlarged. We can probably rule that one out, OK, the third one is that there's stuff in the intestine. And sure enough, it's interesting with a good bio impedance device, we can actually see the body fat going up when someone fasts. Now the fat's not going up, of course, but these devices back into the fat. So they're calculating lean mass, the water, and whatever's left over is fat. 

 

As we hydrate stuff in the intestine, so water anywhere else in the body shows up as water in the body, but the water that we're holding in the intestine, hydrating old material, shows up as fat. So it looks like these people are gaining fat, and I've had people gain fat every single day of the process.

 

Dr Ritamarie (25:49)

They must get frustrated unless they understand.

 

Loren Lockman (25:53)

No, they'd be frustrated. You know, sometimes they're frustrated and sometimes it amazes me. I had a psychologist, a well-educated person who came to me extremely morbidly obese. Again, 5’2”, two hundred and fifty pounds, two hundred sixty pounds when she started at 5’2”. And so she said to me the first day, how much weight do you think I'm going to lose this week? Well, the first week, the average person loses eleven pounds if they're in an appropriate weight range for their height. People who are heavier are going to lose more weight, and people who are lean are going to lose much less. I didn't actually finish that story, but the woman who came to me at 88 pounds, 5’7”, only lost 40% as much weight as the average person does. That's what happens when people are very lean. They lose weight very, very slowly. 

 

In fact, it was fascinating a couple of years ago, I had a gentleman fasting with me for 45 days, I believe it was. He started off 6’2”, 340 or 350 pounds. At the same time, I had a naturopathic doctor fasting with me who was 5'6”, and she weighed 85 pounds. So again, we can actually see what's happening with body fat. And again, I realize these devices aren't perfect. We use a $500 machine. It's pretty good, but it's still not going to be perfect. But according to the machine, he was losing three to four pounds of fat per day.

 

She was losing between one and three percent of a pound of fat per day. So he's literally losing a hundred times or more, more fat than she is. OK, so when someone is very fat, what the body does, incredibly, incredibly intelligent, is it keeps the metabolism high, because it wants to get rid of that stuff. When someone is very lean, slows metabolism down, so they don't lose more weight than they need to.

 

Dr Ritamarie (27:36)

Here's the thing, I've recommended lots of people to fast, and the people that are too lean, and because I don't have a center, I'm not seeing them, I'll set all that. I have always said, no, no, no, you're too thin. If you were heavier, I would recommend fasting, but not, because people are freaked out. Actually people who are thin are more freaked out about their weight than people who are heavy.

 

Loren Lockman (27:38)

Well, often that's true. And so, I do, spend a lot of time educating people. And again, I can assure them that if they do what they need to, they're likely to lose between 40 and 70% as much weight as the average person. But when they're done, I mean, it's crazy what happens. 

 

There's some muscle loss, because the body is converting muscle to sugar to feed the brain. It takes 10 to 11 days for most people to be fully into ketosis where they're running exclusively on fat, almost exclusively on fat, because there's always some muscle being converted to sugar. And again, we measure this every single day. I've seen tens of thousands of data points, because we've been measuring this now for well over 20 years with thousands of people.

 

Dr Ritamarie (28:53)

And you're measuring it how? How are you measuring the ketones? You're doing a finger prick ketone test?

 

Loren Lockman (29:00)

We're not measuring ketones anymore. We stopped doing that, because I didn't really think there was so much point in that. What we're measuring is muscle loss, fat, water, and muscle every day. So we can see what's going on there. There is always going to be some muscle loss, but most people put that muscle back on very quickly after the fast.

 

How quickly depends on how much stuff they have to eliminate. So it can take longer if there's a lot of stuff there that they have to get rid of.

 

Dr Ritamarie (29:30)

And is that with or without resistance exercise?

 

Loren Lockman (29:32)

No, that's once people are refeeding again, I'm encouraging everyone to exercise. You know as well as I do that regular daily activity is absolutely essential to a high level of health. There is no such thing as health without movement. Right. We know we have, and I'm completely clear about this again. You know me well enough to know. There's a full picture. We have to have the water. We have to have the right diet. We need to get enough sleep. We need to get enough exercise and activity. We need to have sunlight, something that a lot of people shy away from. We need that, actually. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (30:08)

Right, yep, and a stress management system.

 

Loren Lockman (30:10)

Absolutely. We have to have some way to deal with the stresses of life. exactly.

 

Dr Ritamarie (30:14)

Right, right, right. Okay, so somebody comes to you, clearly she was 88 pounds at 5’7”, and you didn't recommend against fasting.

 

Loren Lockman (30:25)

No, no, I've had plenty of experience. I've had hundreds of people that lean fast, because again, these are people who can't gain healthy weight with what they're currently doing. Often there's something in their system. They often have a lot of old hard waste, which means they're not absorbing anything very well. So there was that woman, there was the other one, 5’6”, 88 pounds. 

 

We had a guy a year and half ago, a young man, 35 years old from Sweden, who is 6’4”  and weighed 127 pounds. We had a man from Florida who was 6’ tall, 101 pounds. This is when they started their fasts. They're all perfectly fine. They all transformed their health completely by going through the process. 

 

Now, obviously, when someone's very lean, I mean, there are people who are too lean to fast. But it's typically the people who are literally anorexic and in the throes of anorexia. You can't fast them if they have no fat reserves, because they're not fasting, they're starving. But even people who are 5% body fat, and I was there for 30 years, I'm a little heavier than that now, but even those people can easily fast for seven, eight weeks or more.

 

Dr Ritamarie (31:48)

Okay, so tell me what's properly, you drink water, you don't eat anything, what's more to know?

 

Loren Lockman (31:56)

Okay, have you ever seen a dog or a cat get sick enough to refuse to eat?

 

Dr Ritamarie (32:02)

I don't know that I have. I mean, I've seen it theoretically, but I don't know if I've physically been in their presence.

 

Loren Lockman (32:07)

Okay, okay. So anybody who's listening, probably many people have seen this happen. What those animals will do is they will lay down and not move. They might change position, but otherwise they don't walk around. They don't go on Facebook or Instagram. They just rest with their eyes closed as completely as possible, only moving when they absolutely need to. 

 

So the first piece is that fasting is about resting as completely as possible. It's really not something you should do if you have to work. You have to be able to take the time off. I would say when we really want something, we figure out how to make it happen. But many people, they could find it, but it keeps many people from doing it, because it's hard. They have to take the time off, et cetera.

 

But that's the first piece. You have to be resting as completely as possible. 

 

The second piece that's critically important is knowing how to properly interpret daily vital signs. Now you understand vital signs, I'm sure as well as any other practitioner, but I figured some things out according to the 200 or more practitioners who have fasted with me. No one ever learned in school, not in medical school, not in nursing school, not in naturopathic school.

 

It's a way to interpret the numbers that actually tell us whether there's enough blood volume or not. And many people don't think about this. Now, obviously a woman who's menstruating is losing blood every day. But the rest of the people fasting with me are typically not losing any blood, right? 

 

Well, as you know, we're constantly replacing cells. It turns out that according to science, every minute two million blood cells are taken out of circulation, because they're worn out. They're damaged on average. It's two million per minute. In order to replace them, we need water because blood is 92% water. So what happens for most people is they're walking with less blood than they should have. And again, I worked out how to understand blood pressure, pulse, and temperature together to see what's going on there. 

 

In fact, it's interesting, because most people are walking around dehydrated with less blood than they should have. And what that means is that their blood pressure would actually be considerably higher if they had the blood volume, because as blood volume goes down, the pressure goes down. And when the pressure goes down, the heart has to beat faster. And it's interesting, there's a theory you might be aware of that says mammalian hearts on average beat a billion times. Okay, now it's not exactly a billion and then that's Lifetime.

 

Dr Ritamarie (35:00)

Okay, so if you have a rapid heart rate, then you're going to have a shorter lifespan. 

 

Loren Lockman (35:06)

Exactly. And I would say that the average person should have a heart rate of around 50. Resting heart rate should be 50. Obviously, cyclists, runners, competitive athletes, swimmers, these people might have pulses of 32, 36, maybe 40, because they're doing so much cardio. They develop very strong hearts. And the good news is that someone who develops this kind of heart strength until they ruin it can maintain it. 

 

I was a competitive swimmer for 18 years, something like that. But I stopped doing that more than 40 years ago. And I still have a resting heart rate of 50 without having time to do any cardio. That's where it should be. But what's happening for most people, even if it could be there, it's going to be higher, because they're dehydrated, and because they're dehydrated, their blood volume is lower. 

 

If you think about this, your brain is obviously pretty important to the body. You know, for a hundred fifty pound person, let's say, many of the men listening, the brain is about two percent of their body weight, about three pounds, but it gets thirty five percent of the blood supply. That's pretty important. 

 

Making sure there's enough oxygen and nutrients getting to the brain is a critically important thing. Well, if the pressure is artificially low, that means the heart has to beat faster to get the same amount of oxygen or nutrients to the brain. So simply hydrating the body to the extent that we can bring blood volume up to where it should be, means the heart rate can slow way down.  

 

Dr Ritamarie (36:53)

So how are we measuring that? You obviously measure broad pressure, can measure heart rate, but how, if say, I'll give you an example. When I was back in my 20s, and I started running and all that, my fasting heart rate was somewhat 56 or 54 or something like that. And it's gone up. It’s more like 68, 65, sometimes 60. How would I know if that's related?

 

I'm not exercising any less. In fact, I'm exercising more than I was back then. How would I know if that's related to low blood pressure?

 

Loren Lockman (37:28)

Okay, so do you know what your blood pressure tends to be?

 

Dr Ritamarie (37:33)

It tends to be somewhere around 110 over 70-ish, something like that.

 

Loren Lockman (37:40)

Okay, all right, which isn't bad. So first of all, I believe, I know this isn't what they teach in medical schools, I believe that systolic pressure should be between 90 and 110. I've helped thousands of people achieve the highest level of health they've ever experienced and like me, never get sick again. Pressure is always going to be between 90 and 110. So 110 is okay.  

 

But the pulse pressure, the way that's being taught these days, I think they're missing the boat, right? So at 110, I believe the pulse pressure should be 47 points, and yours is 40. It's not bad, because some people are much further off than that. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (38:22)

And the pulse pressure for those listening who don't remember what that is.

 

Loren Lockman (38:28)

Pulse pressure, in fact, I actually call it spread, because it's one syllable instead of three, but it's the difference between systolic and diastolic pressure, right? So 110 minus 70 is 40 points, but I believe at 110, it should actually be 110 over 63. That would be ideal at 110. And again, I've worked this out after looking at thousands and thousands of data points over the last 30 years and seeing what actually happens and what works. 

 

It's interesting, because there's a direct correlation between the difference between where the pulse pressure is and where I believe it should be. I call it the spread differential. That is directly related to the pulse. So if you're in your case, that would make your pulse pressure seven points lower than it should be.  That means a couple of things. Your pulse would be seven points lower. It's a one-to-one correlation. And it sounds crazy, but I've got thousands of data points, and you can see it over and over again. We bring that pulse pressure up seven points where it should be, the pulse falls seven points, all other things being equal. And again, it happens over and over again, which is obviously a very good thing, because we want to slow the heart rate down. 

 

But the other thing that's interesting is that, again, if I'm right, that pulse pressure not being where it should be, what that means is that you have less blood than you should have. Now if you have less blood than you should have nothing's going to function as well as it could. It's not possible. You need to have all the blood possible, right? 

 

So If your blood volume was where it should be, your pressure would actually go up, and I can tell you how much. Yours would be 11 points higher. So it actually would be 121 over 70. Now we're looking at a perfect spread, but the pressure is a little higher than it should be. A little higher than it should be. And that's what's going on for virtually everyone. 

 

So imagine I see people all the time who are, let's say in their mid seventies and they've seen their doctor, and they say to me, my doctor said I'm doing great. My blood pressure is only 132 over 85, something like that. And many doctors are going to tell someone that age, that's not bad for someone your age. That's pretty good.

 

Okay, but 132 over 85 is a 47 point spread when the spread at 135 should actually be 55 points. So their actual pressure would be 12 points higher than it looks like it is. Now all of sudden it's 147 over 85, and no one's going to say that's okay. It's not okay, right? I mean, even 135 is not okay. But you know, it's actually much worse than most people think it is.

 

And this is why there are people who I've been told by people all the time, I had a heart attack or stroke, and my doctor said, but your numbers were fine. It's because they weren't properly interpreting them in the first place. If we actually knew what they really would have been, then we would have seen that coming. It's obviously likely when someone's walking around with pressure that high, especially at that age.

 

Dr Ritamarie (41:43)

So if we want to raise the blood volume, it's not a simple matter of drinking more water. What is the process for that?

 

Loren Lockman (41:53)

Well, it is a simple thing of drinking more water as long as we drink it slowly enough. Here's the thing, your kidneys are filtering. We have two kidneys. They're filtering all of your blood 60 times per day. The kidneys are primarily a set of very long tubes. They're called tubules. And their job is to filter out all of the things, the primary job, is to filter out all the things the body doesn't want in the bloodstream. This includes toxins that should have never been in the body in the first place, right? Anything, whatever you inhale, fumes from the gas pump, cigarette smoke, anything that gets in the body, much of it winds up in the bloodstream and is going to be filtered out through the kidney. So it's our primary way of detoxing. But it also includes things that the body wants and needs, but needs to have in specific quantities or proportions. 

 

The way most people eat, most people are consuming a lot of salt every day. And that means, because sodium and potassium have to maintain this ratio to each other in the bloodstream, the average person has to be excreting salt all the time. That's happening through the urinary tract primarily, it might also happen through sweat. You probably see other people when you run, when they're sweating, you can see the salt stains on their shirt. Right?

 

That's because their body's excreting, or trying to excrete, all this excess salt. Now, I live on fruit and soft leafy greens like lettuce for 33 plus years. I'm consuming very little sodium. Enough, because when the body's in balance, we're not losing those minerals all the time. We're maintaining them. So I don't need a lot to be OK. But I'm consuming a lot of potassium, because fruits are very high in potassium, right?

 

So my body is constantly excreting potassium to make sure this level doesn't go up higher. All right? Each body is going to do whatever it needs to do. That's all happening through the kidneys.

 

In order to raise blood volume, we need to make sure we're taking in water, but not at a rate faster than the kidneys can handle it, because the kidneys are essentially a filter, and every filter has a maximum flow rate. Your kidneys can handle, I've seen it published, up to a liter an hour. What I find is that what's safe, when people are fasting, is no more than 500 milliliters, or roughly 16 ounces, just over 16 ounces per hour, slowly over the course of the hour. It's not just a quantity, it's a pace. I've got a 16 ounce glass here that I'm sipping from.

 

Dr Ritamarie (44:34

Mine's 32, and it's almost at the bottom, but I drink with a straw, so that makes it go slow.

 

Loren Lockman (44:40)

Well, I mean, you can simply time it. You should drink, in my opinion, those 32 ounces over the course of two hours. And I love 16 ounce glasses, containers, glass that you can see through, because if this is the amount that I can drink in an hour, in 30 minutes I should drink no more than that, in 15, no more than that, and in seven and a half, no more than that, and three and three quarters, no more than that, and one and seven eighths like that. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (45:05)

Yeah, but you do that with a 32 ounce mason jar as well, right? This is a two hour supply of water. 

 

Loren Lockman (45:10)

You can do that. Exactly. I mean, it's a little hard. When we're fasting in your normal life, right? And again, I know you're a busy lady, so you're eating. And when you're eating, you're replacing those electrolytes all the time. OK, so it's less critically important when you're eating. When my clients are fasting for nearly a month at a time, it's really important that we're not flushing out electrolytes.

 

I like the one hour supply in a vessel as opposed to a two hour supplier larger, because I want to make sure they're really able to track where it is. Because that's critically important. If they drink too fast, what happens is, they're going to pee out the excess water, but they're going to lose electrolytes at the same time. So the way we increase blood volume is by getting water in slowly enough. 

 

Now, the other thing that we can do is, and for many people, you may already be doing this to a significant extent, but for many people, people are consuming things that are dehydrating to the body. And if they're dehydrating, they're taking water from the body. Right. The estimates are now for the average American close to 70 percent of calories come from ultra processed foods. Crazy.

 

But here's the way I love to talk about this, because it's a great visual. You've eaten corn chips at some point in life.

 

Dr Ritamarie (46:32)

Yes, not for 40 years, but yeah.

 

Loren Lockman (46:35)

I love that. How much water would you guess is in a corn chip?

 

Dr Ritamarie (46:40)

A little bit above zero, if not zero.

 

Loren Lockman (46:44)

Well, it's not zero, it's about 3%, okay? And if 3% sounds like a lot, white bread on average is 50% water. But here's the thing, stool is 75% water. So if you're eating things that are 50 and 60 and 40% water, you are losing water with every meal. But again, let's come back to the corn chips. When the corn chips leave your body, are they as dry as when they went in? You better hope not, exactly.

 

That would be incredibly painful. So they're going in almost completely dry, and they're coming out 75% water. They're taking water from the body. This is why I live on fruits and leafy greens. Now, people think, but we need more protein. And again, I think there's a possibility, Ritamarie, I'm not sure if you're ready for this, so I'm glad you're sitting down. At some point, you and I might both age a little bit at some point.

 

Dr Ritamarie (47:38)

At some point. I'm noticing a few little wrinkles and the gray hair and all that stuff. It happens, right?

 

Loren Lockman (47:45)

It could happen. Actually, my hair is jet black, but I dye it gray, so I get more respect.

 

Dr Ritamarie (47:49)

Okay, got it. That's a good one. That's a good line. Okay.

 

Loren Lockman (47:53)

So I've got to shave the top of my head all the time.

 

Well, it turns out that many of the things that we think of as normal aging are actually, I believe, long term chronic dehydration. And so it's interesting. Last summer, I had a little reunion with five or six of my best friends from high school. I was in San Diego for a couple of months.

 

They had all lived there, and they all came back for reunion while I was there. So we all hung out for a week. Most of these guys look a lot older than I do. A lot more wrinkles on their face, et cetera. And the reason why is because they're not fasting, and they're not eating a high water content diet. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (48:35)

Right, exactly. I noticed that too. People look at me and go, how come you never get older? I'm 10 years older than the last time we met, and you look younger. 

 

Loren Lockman (48:46)

Right. That's what happens. So the diet plays a huge role. But to really hydrate the body. Now, again, let's go back to the mucous plaque. OK, it's living in the small intestine. As you know, the small intestine is only half an inch in diameter. OK, it's all twists and turns. Everything we eat and drink passes through there. Now, water begins to be absorbed through the small intestine into the bloodstream. But most other substances are going to pass through that entire membrane, that entire piece of the intestine. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (49:16)

Well, the nutrients get absorbed, protein gets absorbed, the vitamins, minerals, et cetera, get absorbed. 

 

Loren Lockman (49:21)

But that's right, but what's supposed to happen is the excess water in our food is for, assuming we're eating a high water content diet, it is absorbed way down the transverse colon. So one of the last stages that we bring that water back into the body, it stays in the stool, so we can easily move it through the system. But when people are eating things that are low in water and fiber, it's hard to move stuff through and this is why this stuff gets stuck in there.

 

It's not high enough in water and fiber. It's going to get stuck. This is why you'll hear people, if you've probably seen some of these videos the folks who are now eating a carnivore diet, and they'll say, “I only have a bowel movement every seven to ten days,” and then they'll say something ridiculous like but “That's because I absorb everything I'm eating.” Real carnivores in nature have a bowel movement an hour or two after every meal. They have to eat and excrete, because their intestines are short, smooth, and straight. 

 

A 500 pound tiger, it's 12 feet from mouth to anus. Okay, that tiger is nearly, it's more than four times your size, I'm sure, right? And yet your digestive tract is two and a half times longer, which means 10 times longer proportionally. That's a pretty significant difference. It's completely different. 

 

So in our bodies, anything that goes in that's not high in water and fiber, a little bit gets stuck. It winds up staying there until we fast long enough to properly get this out. In the meantime, I think of it like a giant sponge, because as we eat and drink things where we would normally be absorbing water back into the body. This giant sponge is absorbing the water as the stuff goes through the system. Okay, and then of course at night when we're not eating and drinking for eight or ten hours, what happens is it dries out again, and the stuff never goes anywhere, and so real hydration usually isn't going to happen until we get rid of the stuff. And this happens only by fasting. 

 

My clients have done colonic often. Again, it's not in the colon. And the ileocecal valve prevents that water from moving into us. It's not going to do anything. Salt flushes don't do it. Herbs don't do it. We actually need to fast and let the body break it down, hydrate it enough, and then we can get rid of the stuff.

 

Dr Ritamarie (51:36)

So fasting, we're talking about fasting and a lot of people, there's a stigma, right? There's a stigma, I'm not going to go a long time without fasting. You say 21 days, I've done 28 days, and I've done 12 days, and I've done a lot of five days and seven days and all that. But most people, to them, fasting is 14 to 16 hours from dinner to breakfast, right? And I know you do this similarly. I've always seen you say, I start my meals at noon or two. Same here. So you're getting that every day fast. 

 

Loren Lockman (52:11)

Yes. I do. 19, 20 hours every day for 32 years. And it's interesting, because a lot of people will comment on my videos and say, all you have to do is just fast for 16 hours. No, unfortunately, that's not the case. 

 

While intermittent fasting or having a time feeding window, defined feeding window, that's important, because our bodies, again, processing food takes so much energy, it makes no sense to spend more time processing food than necessary. In fact, I would say the only thing that longevity experts seem to agree on, the only thing they seem to agree on, it's not diet, it's not other choices, it's not biohacking. The only thing they agree on is that consuming more calories than necessary shortens our life. 

 

Some people say, well, Okay, if longer is better, why don't we just eat one meal a day? And that works for some people. However, when you eat the way that I do, okay, my favorite thing is watermelon. I can eat four or five pounds of watermelon at one time. It's not very many calories. But imagine if I had to eat 10 pounds at one time, because I eat twice a day most days. Some days it's only once. There's no way I could get that much into my stomach at one time.

 

And so when you're eating, when you're eating a diet that's not very calorically dense, because it's a fruit based diet or leafy greens, you need to have a slightly longer feeding window for four or five hours. So you can have two meals at either end of that. That 19 to 20 hour window still does wonders. It's amazing. But when there are things that we really need to cleanse or heal, when we need to detoxify 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years worth of stuff that relatively, 16 to 20 hour window, even a one meal a day, a 23 hour window, is not going to be enough to accomplish that. This takes weeks to do.

 

Dr Ritamarie (54:11)

So this is something else that's misunderstood in this fasting world. We hear people say, fasting safe foods. And I'm like, excuse me? You're fasting. There's no food. They'll say to me, well, what do you eat when you're fasting? I'm like, I don't. I drink water.

 

Loren Lockman (54:30)

Right, right. Well, again, this is like so many things. This is pretty significantly misunderstood. And unfortunately, there are people out there that don't really understand themselves, so-called experts that are misinforming people. People will say, well, coffee and tea, for instance, are perfectly fine, because they don't contain calories. As long as you don't put sugar in them, they're fine. The problem is that our bodies are looking for calories or nutrients. If there's calories or nutrients coming in, any type of calories or nutrients, if you put lemon juice in your water, your body sees the nutrients there, vitamin C and other nutrients, and says, there's food coming. And about a third of your energy is immediately shunted to your digestive tract, which takes you out of fasting physiology and puts you back into normal feeding physiology. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (55:18)

That little bit of lemon juice squeezed into water will.

 

Loren Lockman (55:22)

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, my clients have tried everything. And then they come to me and every single person says, that was way more powerful doing it your way. So it's water only, no salt, no electrolytes, nothing else, no lemon juice, nothing at all. And as long as they do this properly, most people, again, are kind of amazed by how long someone can safely go and by the incredible shifts that we see, the benefits that we see. 

 

The first thing, we know that atherosclerosis plaque in the arteries is a significant cause of hypertension. I read that 47% of Americans are dealing with hypertension. That's crazy. We're talking about more than 150 million people in this country alone. Okay. We've had a hundred percent success dramatically reducing hypertension in all but three cases, and all three of these men were in their 70s. And in all the three cases, we get their blood pressure below 120 by the end of 21 days fasting, by the end of the refeeding process. In those three cases, they came down dramatically, but were still higher than 120. One was 122, one might've been 126, but they had started at 175, 180, like that. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (56:45)

Yes, so it's a significant change, and it may take multiple fasts to get them there.

 

Loren Lockman (56:52)

Well, even for many of these people, it's actually going to drop there by the time they're six weeks out of the first fast. Because what happens for most people is during the fast, we're going to see a tremendous amount of plaque eliminated from the arteries. But it will take up to another three to four weeks to finish removing the plaque from the arteries. 

 

This is important, because I remember somebody once who went home, had a blood test, and called and said, my cholesterol had gone up. right. Well, what's happening is there's circulating cholesterol in the bloodstream, because plaque is 50% cholesterol. So we have to give it enough time to give the body enough time to get all the garbage out, right? But the other thing that happens is it can take people weeks, sometimes months. 

 

I'll tell you a crazy story. I had a young woman, not quite two years ago. She came to me on November 11th, 2023. She fasted for 30 days. Now when she started, she is 5′ 7”, and this one woman weighed 99.5 pounds. So heavier than the other one, right, at 5′ 7”. Still pretty lean. And she went 30 days, no problem. Here's the crazy part. She had booked to do a six week fast, 42 days. Okay, well that's a nine week process. And she did this at my center in Costa Rica.

 

She booked a nine week stay, and she stayed the entire time. But because she only fasted 30 days, she had 33 days refeeding. During those 33 days, she averaged 10 bowel movements per day. And then I didn't hear from her. Well, we did our six week follow-up call, and she said to me, I'm still averaging 10 bowel movements a day. Then I didn't hear from her. 

 

So November of last year, it had been over a year since she came to Start Her Fast. It was the end of November. She'd come on the 11th November. And she said through the end of June for more than six months, she averaged 10 bowel movements per day. Even into September, she was still having many days a week with 10 bowel movements. And even in November, it was still happening. So it can take some people a long time to get all the stuff out of the body.

 

Dr Ritamarie (59:19)

Did she eventually normalize down to three, three, two or three? I mean, I think about two or three being the number of meals you eat.

 

Loren Lockman (59:28)

Well, exactly. There should be a bowel movement for every meal. She was eating three meals a day. She did indeed normalize down to three bowel movements a day. But again, an example of someone who couldn't gain healthy weight. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (59:41)

Did she eventually gain weight?

 

Loren Lockman (59:43)

Well, you know what? I haven't heard from her. I'll reach out to her, because I haven't heard from her in a while. So I'm not sure what's happened since the last report. 

 

When someone's having trouble building muscle mass, they're not going to be able to build much until they get this old waste out, because the body's really focused on getting rid of the stuff, which is toxic to us, always. The stuff that's stuck in there is stuff the body wants to get rid of. So it's the primary focus.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:00:00)

Interesting. Okay, so it's not a contraindication if they're too thin.

 

Loren Lockman (01:00:14)

Well, it can be, it can be, but for most people, someone would have to be really, really thin to not be able to fast at all.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:00:20)

Okay. And so you talk a lot about these 21, 28, 30 day, 45 day fasts, and most people practically speaking in their life, it's not a thing that they can do. Right? So is it beneficial to do shorter, shorter fasts more regularly? Like say one year I was doing five day fasts back in 2019, I was doing five day fasts every four to six weeks.

 

And then I started to do that, moving into the following year, my body was like, no, I can't fast. I can't fast. So tell me, talk to me.

 

Loren Lockman (01:01:00)

I don't recommend doing that. The reason why is because from 16 to 20 hours into the process until you're about three and a half days into the process, your body's actually focusing on converting muscle to sugar. And again, this is surprising for people. And it's interesting, because we measure, as I said earlier, we measure muscle mass, body fat, and the water in the body. So even when someone comes in, and they are 350 pounds, I think the largest we've ever had. We actually had somebody once who was too big for our scale. The scale only goes up to 420 pounds, I think, 425 pounds. They were heavier than that. So we have people sometimes who are very, very large. Even those people with a lot of excess body fat, right? This was someone at 400 and more than 420 pounds who probably should have weighed 120 pounds. Okay, so there's a significant amount of fat on the body. Even those people are going to be converting muscle into sugar, because our bodies are set up to run on glucose as the primary fuel. Now, again, this is controversial, because a lot of people now think keto is a wonderful thing. I don't know of anyone who's actually studied this long term and who doesn't have a dog in the race who would say that keto is ever a good idea long-term. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:02:30)

I found that when I'm doing a fast, a five day fast, whatever length it's going to be, I'm measuring glucose and ketones. And usually at probably 24 ish hours in, I'm shifting, the ketones are high, and the glucose is way low. And it stays that way until the end. And then when I start to refeed, obviously it goes back. 

 

That says to me that I'm not losing muscle, converting muscle to sugar, because I would still get the high sugars. But I do see lots of folks who that happens, they just don't have that same reaction that I do. And that by five days they're still having high sugars and low ketones.

 

Loren Lockman (01:03:14)

So your body is well adapted to fasting. But even people who are losing a lot, or converting muscle sugar, we don't necessarily see sugar go high. It just depends on how efficient the body is. Right, the sugar comes into the bloodstream, the body then gets rid of it. It's using it for fuel. So that's the reason this is happening. But my point here, I mean, you're right. Some people are going to be better adapted than others.

 

But generally speaking, this is what happens. And my real point here is that even when someone has a lot of body fat, the body actually wants to run on sugar, not fat most of the time. And so for most people, it's going to stay running on sugar for a few days, and then it's going to start to convert to fat. 

 

For most people, it takes 10 or 11 days for ketones to reach the highest levels, okay, and for muscle loss to minimize. And this is why almost everybody who works with me typically fasts for 10 or 11 days or more.

 

Now, coming back to your question directly, is it beneficial to fast for five days or seven days? It can be, absolutely, especially for someone whose diet has been less than optimal. The truth is that the cleaner your diet is, the less benefit you'll get from a very short fast. I've had people say to me, fasting for 16 hours a day is life changing. Well, these are people that are eating poorly. 

 

I've been doing this for 20 hours a day now for more than 30 years, and it's a great thing, but I don't see profound, obvious profound effects. I'm not saying there aren't any.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:04:54)

Well, you have your general profound effects. You're healthy, you're vibrant, you know what I mean? That's the way you are.

 

Loren Lockman (01:04:59)

Exactly. That's right. That's my baseline. But when I have something, I no longer really fast to detoxify, because I did that and have maintained a clean system ever since. But I still like to be very active. I don't have as much time as I used to, but I mountain bike, rock climb, surf. I have a motorcycle, I had a quadricycle in Costa Rica. I injure myself sometimes.

 

And when I am injured, when I've broken a number of bones, a lot of them, when I break a bone, I fast to allow my body to heal that as quickly as possible. Remember, it's not just detoxification. It allows the body to focus its energy on healing as well. If I have something I need to heal my normal 20 hour daily fast isn't going to do it. When I fast for a week and for me, I mean, I can heal a bone in a week in most cases. It's crazy how fast. It's amazing what happens, but a week? It's profound how much more benefit I get by fasting entirely for seven days as opposed to 20 hours a day.

 

There are benefits, especially for people who are getting started. And in fact, it's interesting.

 

Now, one of the things I've heard from people over the years, I mean, I've stayed super busy. We've never advertised, we've never done any paid marketing, but I have people come back, and I have people referring their friends and family, because it's so profound what happens for them. And so I've stayed about as busy as I could be all these years. But now that I'm not running the center anymore, I'm just working with people remotely. I'm not managing 25 people. I'm not managing the facilities and 37 acres and a whole team of grounds people.

 

I've got more time on my hands. And so we're launching a new program, because what's occurred to me is, there's a lot of people out there that are never going to do this, because they can't see their way to creating 21 days. 

 

So it's going to be a seven day fast, a four week program, but only seven days of fasting. So the other three weeks, they don't have to take off from work. Okay. It's three weeks of education, because I can teach people how to create the highest level of health possible by meeting all their body's needs. They still have to fast. And for most people, this won't really be long enough to give them the greatest effects. What I'm hoping will happen is that people can say, you know what? I can do seven days. I can take a week off. And then they're going to see how profound the experience is. And then they'll figure out how to take more time off another time. So we'll see what happens with that.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:07:43)

Interesting. It'd be very interesting to see, because making fasting more accessible to people I think could be important. And that's the thing I hear all the time. And for me personally, I used to easily fast and lately I can't get into it. The first day is the hardest. It has always been for me. It's like, and then by the second day it's like, you already did it for a whole day. Just keep going, even if it's hard. But I have not been able to get past that first day in several months, and I like to do a periodic, at least 24 hour fast. But do you find that with folks? Is it that my body got out of balance and now I can't fast as well or that? 

 

Loren Lockman (01:08:23)

Well, it's possible. I mean, certainly, unfortunately, what tends to happen as we get older is we get more dehydrated. Most people are a little bit more every day. That makes the body less efficient at detoxing on an ongoing basis. It's also true that if your lifestyle choices, I know they've been excellent for a long time, but if they're not optimal, then, there is going to be over time, the impact of stored toxins. 

 

So it makes sense that if it's now many years later, since those longer experiences, it's going to be a little harder for your body to do. And it's an interesting point, because many people say to me, that's crazy. I can't even skip lunch, or I feel terrible. I've always said to them, the harder it is to skip a meal, the more meals you probably need to skip.

 

Because what happens is when most people, the only time they're not processing food during the day is at night when they're asleep, right? They have that long break. Most people are eating from shortly after they wake up until shortly before they go to sleep. And so there's very little detoxing that happens, because processing food takes so much energy. This, I would suggest, is why we wake up with bad breath and a coated tongue and stinky pits, because our bodies have been detoxing overnight much more than they do during the day. So when we get the body clean enough, this doesn't happen.

 

It's crazy what can shift. I mean, I guarantee people, if they're coachable, if they're willing to do what they need to, and they go long enough, it's life changing for most people. It's profound what happens.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:10:09)

So when you talk about this, I want everybody to hear that, if people are going to be fasting, but living their life, like when I did all those five day fasts or 10 day fasts, whatever, I was just working the same, you know, go out for runs, got to lift weights. I did all my normal stuff. I just didn't eat. And I know that that's not ideal. It's not going to be the same as if I went to bed. 

 

My first fast of 28 days, I went to a fasting place, and that's what I did. I stayed in bed, and I got up and walked around a little bit, and I went back to bed and lights out at nine o'clock and that kind of thing. That was very different than me doing it at home while I'm running a business and having kids and all that. 

 

Loren Lockman (01:10:53)

No doubt. There's a profound difference, because again the entire point really is to conserve as much energy as we can so the body can use that to cleanse and heal. So if we're still being active, I mean people can do it, and with this new program we're launching, we're going to tell people it would be recommended that you rest for those seven days, but because it's only seven days, you don't have to if you don't feel like you can. 

 

Now, I would still say, OK, if you have to work, you run a business. I run a business, right? We have to respond to messages every day and take some calls and maybe do a few things. You know, it's easier for an employee to take the week off, and they don't have to do anything at all. When you run your own business, there is no real time off. But still, I would say to somebody rest as often as you can.

 

Maximize the rest as much as you can. Do what you have to do, don't do anything you don't have to.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:11:53)

Absolutely. And I agree with that. And I think when people listen, and a lot of practitioners are listening, I can't recommend this to people, they won't even skip breakfast, but good, better, best, right? 

 

So I want to talk to you, obviously the best is the full fast, whatever it might be best for that person, 28 days, 31, 35, let's go to what’s best. So let's go back to better and then let's go to good.

 

Loren Lockman (01:12:16)

Okay. Well, most people would probably benefit by fasting up to 30 days. Okay. And I've talked about a lot of people doing that. I normally recommend a minimum of 21.  If you're listening, and you're dealing with type 2 diabetes or arthritis or hypertension, type 2 diabetes, a hundred percent so far we've had a hundred percent success at eliminating it. No need for medication. Easy.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:12:43)

We do that just with food. I mean, that's easy. 

 

Loren Lockman (01:12:45)

You can do that by cleaning up the diet, right? It's mostly obesity. But if you're simply not feeling as well as you'd like to, but there's no significant diagnosis, the longer you fast, the more benefits you'll get. Okay. So, I'd be really honest with myself and say, okay, well, what am I, how much time can I take off? What am I willing to do?

 

We have many people who take their vacation, maybe take paid leave as well, because it's going to take people to a whole new level. But, 21 to 30 days, that's really ideal for most people. And in some cases, some people with some situations actually want to go even longer than that. But, good for most people would prove better would be that's best. So better would be somewhere in the 10 to 20 day range. 

 

And then for someone who can't do that, or that's difficult, or maybe they just want to get their toes wet, I would say do at least seven days. Now here's the thing about this. You did your first fast with guidance, right? You were in a specific place.

 

Virtually every fasting expert who's been alive for the last 200 years would say the same thing, don't do more than five days or so without having experience or guidance. You really need to know what's going on. You need to understand the process. You asked me earlier, “Well, you're just not eating, and you’re drinking water, right?” That's true. 

 

Three weeks ago, I had a client fast with me for the second time. On that, we do small group calls with up to six people. There was someone on her second fast, third fast, and fourth fast, all on the same call. And the woman doing her third fast has already booked her fourth one. She just did that yesterday.

 

These people have worked with me extensively already, but they still need me every day to interpret their numbers and help them every single day. Every client gets a spreadsheet. It's a shared Google doc. They need to have some tools. They need to have a blood pressure monitor and infrared thermometer, ideally a pulse oximeter, a decent bioimpedance scale at a minimum. Anyone with blood sugar issues needs to have a blood sugar meter. They probably have one already.

 

And for people that don't, if they're willing to, for me, my perspective is, more data is useful. The more data we have, the better, right? So I would have people measure all these things. Every day, they're going to put them on the spreadsheet. I give them the specific protocol. They measure them themselves. They put them on the spreadsheet. And then we have a daily call where we go over those numbers, how they're feeling, what their symptoms are, and any questions that they have. Because most people left to their own devices are going to say, my God, is this okay? Maybe I should eat, right? Where, I can say to them, I've seen this 5,000 times before. There's nothing to worry about. This is a normal thing, right? It's perfectly okay. 

 

And so almost everybody, I mean my completion rate with clients, is around 99%. Almost everyone completes the process they start out to do. In some cases, someone will book a long fast and maybe cut it short by a couple days, because it gets very difficult for them. And it's important to understand, when your body's detoxing, you typically don't feel that well. I mean, some people feel okay, but you could experience any symptom at all. And again, I don't think we really covered this early on, but most people don't understand that symptoms are never the problem. 

 

One of the things, Ritamarie, I hear all the time is some will say to me, well, I'm not sure if I was sick or if it was just a healing crisis. And I'll say, it's always a healing crisis. A cold or flu is your body detoxing. And this is why it's interesting too, because there may be someone listening. 

 

I met a man, I was on a lecture tour in Southern California, several years back. And the organizer introduced me to a friend of hers who was a billionaire. And she was upset, because he wasn't interested in coming to any of the events. So I said, can I meet him? So he and I took a walk down the beach together for about an hour. And at the time, the flyer said something like, Loren hasn't been sick a day in 19 years. This was like 20 years ago. He hasn't been sick a day, right? First thing he said to me was, I'm never sick either. And I said to him, that might be a good thing. And he said, what do you mean it might be a good thing? How could it not be a good thing? I said, well, if you're never sick, because your body has no need to cleanse or heal, that's great. If you're never sick, because your body doesn't have the energy to cleanse or heal, not so good, right? 

 

He got it. And by the end of the conversation, he said to me, Loren, everything you said makes sense. It's going to take me about six months to clear my schedule. And he was a busy guy running a bunch of companies. He said, but in about six months, I'm going to come spend a month with you. It never happened, because two months later, at the age of 47, he dropped dead. He was never sick. He was 47 years old.

 

He thought he was healthy, because he was never sick. OK, he wasn't healthy. He was so unhealthy. As we walked away from him, the organizer said to me, what do you think? I said, I think he's in deep doo doo. And she said, what do you mean? So we had walked shoulder to shoulder for an hour. She hung back behind us. As you said in the entry, beginning of the podcast, I'm a Reiki master. I work with and can feel people's energy.

 

I said to her, he's got less energy than this parking meter. Okay, not good. It's not good. And sure enough, he was dead two months later. So unfortunately, there may be people listening who think, well, I'm okay, I don't get sick. That could be a good thing. And it could be that there isn't enough energy to do what your body needs to. When we fast, we liberate all this energy, then we see people. And this is why often when people stay active, they say, well, this is much easier. I feel fine. And that's because they're just not going as deep that way. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:19:00)

Got it. Great. Okay, well, this has been enlightening. Lots of good stuff here. just for people listening, for folks who are doing a 16 to 20 hour fast a day, they're doing their body some good, correct? They're just not getting to the same level of depth. And it's better than continuing to eat three, four meals a day, and five meals a day. 

 

Loren Lockman (01:19:12)

Absolutely. Yes, there’s no question about it.

 

No doubt about it. I believe virtually everybody should be eating twice a day. That's best for most people. Again, some people can do it once, more than twice, with the exception of people who have anorexia. People who really can no longer handle any quantity of food and are severely underweight. They often need to eat multiple meals per day. But for most people, this is not a good idea. Yeah.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:19:45)

That's typically what I recommend. And when I have people on some of my coaching calls, and they're asking, I'm losing weight? I can't gain weight. People are obsessed with having to gain weight, and they may only be like a pound or two less than their ideal, but they're obsessed about it. I'm like, don't worry about it. But I will if somebody is really severely having trouble with that. Don't listen to my thoughts of what I said to Carol over there for you. I want you to eat four times a day, because you can't get enough, and you've got to keep that happening.

 

And we have to look at individuals. 

 

Loren Lockman (01:20:19)

No, no question about it. I mean, there are general principles that, having now fasted 12,000 people, I can say, well, usually this is what's going to happen. But each person is an individual. I'm talking to every single person, every single day to make sure that they're doing what they need to do.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:20:39)

And for people who want to fast and aren't going to go to a place or consult with someone like you, what would you say is the safest, longest time that you would recommend that somebody fast at home?

 

Loren Lockman (01:20:48)

I wouldn't recommend most people doing more than four or five days. It's not that that's really a good idea, it's that there's a limit to how much damage they can do in four or five days. What I would say to people is, I know there are people for whom paying what I charge, for some people that might be a significant investment. For many people it's not a big deal, but if it's a significant investment, understand that people say, I just can't swing that. And what I usually remind people is, I get it. It's a big deal. And I understand. I've been there. I've been there. So I understand. But what's more important than your health?

 

We find a way to do what we want to do. And I tell people, look, this is the greatest investment you can make in yourself. So it's definitely worth it. I don't know of anyone who would say that wasn't a good investment. Almost everyone says it's the best thing.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:21:49)

Absolutely. I agree. I agree. We have to put our health first. And as health practitioners, those of you listening are, you're dealing with clients and patients every single day. And a lot of times you're scratching your head going, why is this not working? This person's meditating, and they're exercising. And why are they not getting well? Well, this built up. 

 

And I remember the day when my book was Fasting Can Save Your Life, Herbert Shelton that somebody recommended I read. So when I read that book, and I started reading, because I had been in a health crisis and was looking from doctor to doctor, like you, not getting any solutions. And I realized, I'm not sick, I'm toxic.

 

My whole life has led me to this place of being toxic and nutrient depleted, right? And so what did I need to do? And when I read about fasting, I'm like, I got to do this. And I did, I went to this place in California, and I spent 30 something days there, but I fasted for 28, and it changed my life completely. Like all the problems I had beforehand, I never had again, right?

 

And it's very profound, it really is profound. And a lot of people are afraid of it. And I would say, I understand you being afraid of it, but what's on the other side is so phenomenal.

 

Loren Lockman (01:23:12)

What's on the other side is so phenomenal. Oh, it's incredible. I'm sorry I'm realizing that we're in this already for a while and probably need to wind it up, but we didn't really cover some of the amazing miracles that we see happening all the time. It's incredible what the body does. 

 

What I would say, Dr. Ritamarie, is that perfect health is the birthright of every living organism. We're meant to feel and function incredibly well. Most people, unfortunately, it's kind of like the frog that you can boil alive, right? Because the temperature is going up slowly. 

 

Most people are slowly going downhill their whole life. And finally, they wake up, and they go, now this doesn't work anymore. Well, it didn't happen overnight. It's been getting there slowly. You know, again, I'm seeing this with my own siblings and with all my old friends.

 

It doesn't have to be that way, okay? We can continue to feel and function better than we ever have. And the cool thing is, in most cases, we can still get it back, even if we've already lost it. 

 

Most of my clients, if they wear glasses or lenses, are going to need a much weaker prescription by the time they've done a long enough fast.

 

I had a guy who was lead guitarist for the loudest rock and roll band in his city. That was their claim to fame. Loudest rock and roll band in Melbourne, Australia for more than 25 years. He had lost 70% of his hearing being on stage night after night. And he fasted 42 days and regained 100% of his hearing. 

 

I had a young man who'd been snorting a lot of cocaine, had completely lost his sense of smell, completely got it back. Had a woman who was paralyzed in a car accident in California, rolled her car, broke her neck. I forgot which one. Paralyzed from here down. And it had been four and a half years. Okay, now medicine says two years after paralysis, if there's no healing, no healings possible. She was able to have bowel movements, to feel her spine, and to begin using her hands for the first time after four and a half years after fasting. It's incredible. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:25:26)

And it's overlooked. It's not mainstream enough. People don't consider it a viable approach. And I want to ask you one last question about contraindications. People who are on medications, we work with people, and they come in, and they're on like four or five medications. What do you do? You can't fast them while they're on medications.

 

Loren Lockman (01:25:45)

No, no, they can't fast. No, they have to be willing and able to come off those medications. Well, I typically don't work with their doctors. They do. But they'll have to work with their doctors. Yes, exactly. In some cases, it depends on what it is. Obviously, some medications they can simply stop taking.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:26:05)

It depends on the medication. If they're on insulin, not insulin so much as metformin or blood pressure, you're going to just have the monitoring and you go, we don't need this anymore, right? But other medications, it's much more important to be tracking it and working with a doctor. Or they'll be working with a doctor that prescribed the medications to gently wean them off as they need less. 

 

Loren Lockman (01:26:26)

Well, they need to wean off, before we get started. And that's what usually happens. I mean, unfortunately, some people say, no, I can't come off of blood pressure medication. I say, no, everybody who fasts with me, regardless of where they start, winds up with blood pressure that's reasonably healthy. So come off of it. OK, it's not. If you already know this, I'm sure. Statistically, hypertensive medications don't extend the average person's life a single day, and they create all kinds of negative side effects. So there's really no good reason to stay on them. Come off them, your blood pressure is going to go up a bit when you come off of them, but we're actually going to be able to give your body a chance to truly heal and you won't need them anymore.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:27:11)

Well, thank you, thank you, thank you. We started today with the idea that our bodies are self-healing, like you said, that one thing that heals is this body. And I have patients who say to me, you're a miracle worker. I'm like, no, I'm not. You're a miracle worker, right? I just helped facilitate that and get you out of your way, right? And that's the thing. And they know how to heal. We know how to repair.

 

We know how to restore energy. We know how to restore vitality. And fasting isn't about deprivation. It's about coming back, getting it back, freeing you from the need to eat every day, the desire to eat, the cravings for eating, all of that stuff goes away.

 

Loren Lockman (01:27:54)

It's funny, because I often use the exact same language that you've just used to talk about this. Yeah, it's liberation. It's being free. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:28:00)

That's great. It is. And that's for me is my top value is I want to be free. Why do I want to be healthy? Because I want to be free. I want to not be encumbered.

 

Loren Lockman (01:28:11)

Well, I think in the end we all want to enjoy life. We want to feel good. But how much more enjoyable is life when your body doesn't hurt? When things function, when you can do anything you want to, right?

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:28:25)

Yes! Do anything you want when you want to do it. Right. That's how you get joy. And it's not selfish to want to be joyful or have pleasure in your life. And then you can give more to others when you have joy. If Loren was still in pain, he wouldn't be helping so many people. And we all have to look at that. Like, what do we need to do to help people access that inner healer, get out of their way? And with all your experience, and your decades of helping people, you see a lot of this and those of you listening, see what kinds of things can be helped. 

 

Loren Lockman (01:28:56)

Absolutely. And you know, I think everybody wants to help. But it's not just that. I believe every single one of us has genius in some way. Now, lots of people never figure out where their genius lies. But you know what? They're not going to if they're not functioning at the highest level. We have to function as well as we can.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:29:16)

We have to function as well as we can. And I recall having a conversation with my mom just a few years before she passed on, and she was only 56, saying, I don't want to live alone. I don't want to be old and decrepit and hurt, but you don't understand what you're doing to yourself is causing you to age ungracefully.

 

Loren Lockman (01:29:40)

Right. That's most people in the same position..

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:29:44)

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, our bodies are designed to heal, and we see changes from fasting with blood sugar, blood pressure, all the common ailments that are killing people in our society. Autoimmune, I'm sure you've had people reversing autoimmune conditions with fasting. 

 

Loren Lockman (01:30:00)

Over and over again. Our bodies aren't stupid. Okay, they're not attacking themselves. It's just that we've created a situation that we need to undo.

 

Dr Ritamarie (01:30:11)

And these repair mechanisms are there. They're waiting for us to activate them. We just have to get out of the way. So thank you for sharing all your wisdom and your stories. And it gives people hope. Hopefully we also get people listening that are not practitioners that are just here for their own health. And maybe this has inspired you to look for this, look for help, and get some help so that you can get on a fasting regime to get there, and you have as much passion about this as I do, like helping people and making an impact. 

 

And I want to thank you and thank all of you who are listening for being on this path, because we're truly reinventing healthcare. And it's one empowered choice at a time. And that's critical, empowered choices.

 

We're the future of healthcare. Those of us who are looking at no longer suppressing symptoms, because that's an outdated model, right? Just drug, drug, drug, drug, drug, get rid of symptoms, looking at symptoms as a message from the body. And what can we do to repair, right? What can we do? So I thank you for being here and I thank you all for listening. And until next time, shine on.

the cleaner the diet
seeing a tree through your window

Listen on your favorite podcast platform!

Share This Episode

Ritamarie Loscalzo

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is a best-selling author and speaker known for her extensive knowledge, infectious energy, and inspirational message that encourages individuals to become their own best health advocate. She is an internationally recognized nutrition and health authority who specializes in using the wisdom of nature to restore hormone balance with a special emphasis on thyroid, adrenal and insulin imbalances. She founded the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology to empower health and nutrition practitioners to get to the root cause of health concerns by using functional assessments and natural therapeutics to balance the endocrine system, the body's master controller.

Dr. Ritamarie is a licensed Doctor of Chiropractic with Certification in Acupuncture and is a Diplomat of the American Clinical Nutrition Board. She is a Certified Clinical Nutritionist with a Master’s in Human Nutrition, has completed a 2-year, 500-hour Herbal Medicine Program at David Winston’s Center for Herbal Studies and has a master's degree in Computer Science, which contributes to her skills as an ace problem solver.