A 5-Day Post-Celebration Fasting Mimicking Metabolic Makeover

What’s Inside This Episode?

• Holiday Metabolic Chaos: How celebrations wreak havoc on sleep, stress, and metabolism—and why resetting is essential.
• The Power of Fasting: Discover the benefits of fasting for regulating blood sugar, lowering insulin levels, and boosting brain and gut health.
• Fasting-Mimicking Diet Explained: How Dr. Ritamarie’s whole-food-based program replicates the benefits of fasting without going hungry and without packaged foods.
• Client Success Stories: Real-life transformations, including significant reductions in blood sugar levels in just a few days.
• Practical Steps for Practitioners: Implement fasting-mimicking strategies and time-restricted eating to help clients achieve incredible results.

Resources and Links:

• See the Full Transcript here
• Download the Free Fasting While Feasting Guide for a step-by-step plan.
• Join the Next-Level Health Practitioner Facebook Group for community and resources.
• Reserve your spot for ReInvent 2025, a deep dive into metabolic health and root-cause strategies. If you missed this event, you can still catch the recordings.
• Visit INEMethod.com for advanced practitioner training and tools to elevate your practice.
• Learn more about insulin resistance and metabolic health with Dr. Ritamarie’s Insulin Resistance Mastery Course.

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo’s Bio

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is a pioneering expert in functional nutrition and metabolic health, with over 33 years of clinical experience. As the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, she’s dedicated to training health practitioners to uncover root causes and create lasting results for their clients. Her mission is to reinvent healthcare by empowering practitioners to integrate personalized, science-backed approaches to health restoration.

Ready to transform your practice or personal health? Dive into this episode and discover the tools to make it happen!

Transcript

Dr Ritamarie 

Welcome back to the podcast. Even people with healthy and resilient body systems are impacted by the metabolic strain of holiday indulgences. There’s stress, there’s disrupted sleep, there’s all the dietary indiscretions and excesses, plus other extra demands, maybe from family and professional requirements. 

After the holidays, after celebrations, I find people and patients that come to see me with post holiday biochemical stress. Now people have a lot of biochemical stress all the time. And biochemical chaos ensues after lack of sleep and partying too much and eating too much food. We get elevated cortisol, we get blood sugar dysregulation, we have inflammatory markers that get elevated and people don’t feel so good.

They’re, after holidays and after celebrations, like, okay, get me back on track. And it requires interventions. It requires assessments. It requires figuring out what they need to do to get back in shape. But the good news is I have a way that I want to talk to you about today. That’s five days, and you can reset the metabolism to a significant degree. So let’s jump in and get started.

Dr Ritamarie (01:39)

I have been on the health track personally for like 33 years. And when I first started in health, it was because I was falling apart, and it was because my body wasn’t nourished properly, and it was overly toxic. And I discovered the magic powers of fasting almost 40 years ago. I did my first fast, and it was like a five day allergy relief system fast.

After that, I did a 28 day water fast, and my life was forever changed. And I mean that literally. After that fast, or during that fast, I actually decided I was going to leave my job in the computer field, and I was going to go back to school, and I was going to become a health practitioner. At that point, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do and what path I would take, but time would resolve those questions.

Dr Ritamarie (02:29)

When I discovered fasting, when I first started reading about fasting, back 40 years ago, before there were a lot of books and a lot of websites and a lot of podcasts and a lot of YouTubes talking about it. Those didn’t exist.There was no  internet back then. I discovered by reading some books, wow, fasting could have some health benefits. It could have some magical properties. When I actually experienced it for myself, I was blown away. 

I went from being brain fogged, fatigued, chronic sinus problems, and gut problems. I just was a mess. I was a mess. And I’d seen doctor after doctor after doctor. Nobody could help me. They put me on all kinds of medications. I was on Valium and steroids and antibiotics and ulcer medication to no avail. And so fasting gave me back my life. I would say fasting probably saved my life, because the path I might have kept on, might’ve killed me by now. 

But now, 40 years later, I feel great all the time. And when I learned about it, when I saw what fasting did for me, I wanted to share it with other people. But I think back then people weren’t quite ready for it like they are now. And nobody was talking about the concept of intermittent fasting, right? Fast for a period of time, and then eat, and then fast for a period of time. It was kind of like all or nothing, right? Extended fasting, or nobody was talking about intermittent fasting.

Dr Ritamarie (03:56)

So as I started working with people, I could see that they would benefit from a fast, and a long fast is not something you want to undertake on your own. 24 hours, 48 hours, even 72 hours, no problem. But once it gets beyond that, it’s kind of a good idea to have supervision. 

So at that point I would say, why don’t you go talk to Dr. Goldhammer at True North? They had just opened up their doors back then. And most people would come back and say, “No, I can’t do it, it’s too extreme.” 

So I had to, over the years, develop strategies for helping people to incorporate fasting into what they were doing and get the benefits of fasting without actually having to go without food for extended periods of time, like I did. 

Well, about 12 years ago, I started talking about intermittent fasting. I started reading some books and reading research. And again, before every other YouTube channel was talking about it. 

And I started getting great results with people. They joined me for an insulin resistance reversing program and people got amazing results. And then about, I don’t know, six or seven years ago, Dr. Valto Longo did some groundbreaking research and discovered that something called the fasting mimicking diet, that you could actually eat but get the same benefits of fasting. And he documented this that people were getting similar. I mean, it’s not 100%, but similar results to fasting.

Results were like lowering blood glucose, lowering insulin, increasing ketones, lowering blood pressure, heart issues starting to resolve themselves, cholesterol levels going down, et cetera. And he outlined a particular strategy for doing that, macronutrients and calorie restriction. And so when I learned about that, I was very excited, but what he did to make it easy for people was to create a package of packaged food.

It wasn’t something I wanted to do myself, because I didn’t really like eating packaged soup mixes and things like that. And most of my clients are already beyond that kind of eating. So I created my own program. I have guided hundreds of people by now. I think we’ve done it live five times, where I just take people through five days for a reset, basically a reset. And I’ve done it between the holidays. 

Dr Ritamarie (06:13)

I’ve done it before the holidays, I’ve done it at random times, like in the fall after, you know, a big summer, and people get great results. So I want to tell you how that works, so that you can do this yourself. 

So there’s a particular set of macronutrient ratios that he discovered that when you eat that way, and it’s lower calorie, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like you’re going to eat to your heart’s content. 

It is lower calorie, but it’s not low calorie in the sense that people just cut out calories, and they starve. The mechanism by which it works is not the lower calories as much as the ratios of fat,carbohydrate, protein, and the timing of how you do it.

Dr Ritamarie (06:55)

So how do you get the benefits of fasting and still eat food? Well, first of all, let’s talk about the benefits of fasting. I mentioned a few of them, lowering blood glucose, regulating blood glucose, lowering insulin levels, regulating them. So sometimes people don’t want to lower their insulin levels, because they’re type one diabetic. 

And by the way, I don’t recommend anybody who’s anorexic or very low weight or has low blood pressure already or low blood sugars, or is a type one diabetic to do something like this without doctor’s supervision. So that’s an aside. 

Basically what you’re doing is eating a nutrient dense breakfast. If you eat breakfast in the morning or whether you’re already intermittent fasting, and you’re eating it at one o’clock or 12 o’clock or 11 o’clock, whatever, but you eat a nutrient dense, two meals a day, third meal optional.

Most people that go through it, do the three meals, but some people do two meals. And you’re getting all your calories in the two to three meals. It’s easier to do two meals and feel satiated at each meal, but people doing three meals, they’re saying, I can’t finish all this food. Why? Because it’s nutrient dense, it’s fiber rich, it’s loaded with phytochemicals, it’s loaded with deliciousness actually, vitamins, minerals, et cetera, and people feel satiated after the meals. 

So people eat this way for five days. The first day is more of a transition day. So you may go from eating, you know, maybe you typically eat 2000 calories a day, and this is 1100. It’s about 35% of what you normally would eat. That’s how you calculate it. But after that, it’s somewhere in the range of 500 to 700 calories. And again, it depends on your activity level and your size, et cetera, but it’s more like 25% of what you typically would eat, 20 to 25 or even maybe 30. 

And you’re eating these meals. So what did I put together? So I put together a menu plan that basically has a nutrient-dense breakfast. I often have some kind of green shake in the morning or yogurt. We even have a granola recipe in our recipe guide. And then at lunchtime, you’ll be doing, say, a big salad, maybe some sauerkraut with tasty dressing.

Dr Ritamarie (9:12)

We don’t put oil in this menu plan because oil is like, it’s not nutrient dense, right? It’s not nutrient dense. It’s calorie dense, but it’s not filling, right? You can probably drink a quarter cup of olive oil and not feel like you ate anything; meanwhile, you’re getting like, I mean, 400, 500 calories. So, we don’t use oils. We use whole food, plant-based fats. 

His menu plan, Dr. Longo’s, was 100% plant-based for those five days. So that’s what I mimicked. I mimicked exactly what he did, exactly what he said, and we’re eating delicious foods. 

So why would you do something like this? Well, to get the benefits of fasting. In addition to the ones I already mentioned, the lowered blood glucose and regulation of that, and the insulin, and raising ketones, brain chemistry improves, 

neurotransmitters improve, gut improves, because you’re lowering the load on the gut. Those are the things that fasting does. 

Now this isn’t 100% fasting, so if you do have food sensitivities, or you do have an irritated, inflamed gut, you want to be careful about the fiber. You probably want to blend everything or cook everything, to make sure that you’re not getting so much roughage. So that’s if you already know that you have a problem with that. I created a new version that’s low oxalic, because a lot of people have problems with oxalates. So we created that. 

It can be very simple. It can be as simple as a green smoothie, green shake, chia porridge in the morning with some green powder in it and maybe some yogurt. I like non-dairy yogurt, coconut, cashew, homemade, from the store, whatever, but read the labels. We have a long list of things you should be avoiding like alcohol and caffeine and all the additives and preservatives and colors. 

But when you do this after an indulgence period. When you do this after you’ve been through Hanukkah, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, when you’ve been through that, it’s so much better. Because people don’t feel good at the beginning of the year. We know that. We look around and everybody’s offering some kind of cleanse or reset and everybody’s making New Year’s resolutions that they can’t keep. 

Dr Ritamarie (11:19)

This is a way that you can get your body healthy and in shape in just five days. And the results I’ve gotten with people, like people have lost up to 10 pounds. I go, that’s going to be water, right? But up to 10 pounds, anywhere from three to four in people who are lighter up to 10 pounds. 

They have gone from being in the diabetic range of glucose. Say their fasting glucose is over 125. We had one lady, her fasting glucose was 160. 160, sometimes higher, sometimes up to 200 or 220, and she was able to reduce her levels down. 

One lady had been diabetic for 15 years, was on insulin and metformin. On day four, she tells me that her blood glucose had dropped to 60. I asked her about her medications, of course, she told me she was on them. I said, “Contact your doctor right away,” and she said,  “I already did. My doctor took me off the metformin and halved my insulin.” And this happened in three days, three days.

So the body is miraculous. Your body is miraculous. Your client’s bodies are miraculous. Wouldn’t you like to have a tool that you can use to help them reset, to help them get the benefits of fasting without having to fast? 

Now, in this plan that I put together, I recommend that if you already do intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, right? You eat in an eight-hour period, a 12-hour period, that you continue to do that. And if you don’t, try to do that.

Start with a 12 hour period and then go to 10 and then go to eight and see how your body reacts. Many people who do that just get phenomenal results in their gut just by keeping their eating in a window. 

After the holidays, how do you reset? How do you recommend your clients reset? A fasting mimicking diet plan is phenomenal. Just even going on intermittent fasting without changing much of what you’re eating is going to have a huge difference. 

Dr Ritamarie (13:16)

When you combine intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating with eating nothing but whole, fresh, plant-derived ingredients in a specific caloric and macronutrient ratio, you get amazing results. I’ve seen it over and over. 

I recommend that you check it out below. We have a link to where you can get more information, and I will give you a free copy of my guide, the basic plan. You can just put your name and email address and get a copy of that. And then if you ever want to join us live, you can do that too. 

I can’t wait for you to get the benefits, for you to get ,for your clients, the benefits of a fasting mimicking, diet plan for five days in the way that famous researcher, Dr. Valter Longo put together, but using whole fresh foods.

Dr Ritamarie (14:12)

We are the future of healthcare, you and I as functional health practitioners, and all of us that are really committed to putting the care back into the word healthcare, and shifting the paradigm from symptoms suppression to actually getting to the root causes. 

I’ve dedicated my life to this, to training other practitioners to do this. And I just think it’s an amazing journey that we’re on, and we need to do our best to help people. 

So if you’re ready to take your practice to the next level, I invite you to visit us at inemethod.com. And if you want to learn more about insulin and metabolic health and blood sugar balance and gut health, make sure to visit the show notes for important links. And together, let’s continue the movement to reinvent healthcare. And until next time, shine on.