Dry Fasting for Stem Cells, Fat Loss & Cellular Repair

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity. The show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Imagine going a full day or two or five with no food and no water. Not a sip. It sounds insane, maybe dangerous, but your body has a hidden setting for exactly this.

Nick Urban [00:01:06]:
When you stop drinking, it starts making its own water by burning your fat. Now, that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but my guest today, Theo, runs a natural health project called Forgotten Health, and he spent over a decade studying the practices most of us were never taught. He’s going to show us why the hardest reset on the planet might also be one of the most healing. Theo, welcome back to the show.

Theo Lucier [00:01:33]:
Easily the best introduction I’ve ever had. Thank you, man. You’re very welcome.

Nick Urban [00:01:39]:
For someone who’s never heard of it, what is dry fasting and what does it feel like when you’re going through it for the first time?

Theo Lucier [00:01:46]:
That is such a good question. And you know, I’ve done so many dry fasts now, and we’ve had dozens of people through Dry Fast with Friends. As far as what it feels like, it changes over time. So the more you do, the more your nervous system gets used to it. And it’s not as intense. And also it depends on your age. So the younger you are, the harder it is physically. The older you are, the easier it is physically.

Theo Lucier [00:02:21]:
And the reason why is because, you know, as you age, your body dries out. So infants have a ton of, like, their body’s like mostly water. And then as we age, that percentage goes down. And by the time people are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, they’re, they’re, you know, they’re fairly dried out, so they’re kind of like chronically dehydrated all the time. And it doesn’t really phase them. We’ve had, we’ve had a couple guys. One. One guy was 82, and not only did he get on a rowing machine for 20 minutes every day, he increased the intensity all the way up until the end of his first five day dry fast.

Theo Lucier [00:03:03]:
And he was going for long walks. And we’ve had younger people where they were kind of like me. I mean, my first time I was kind of incapacitated for a while. It was, it was quite the shock to my body in a good way. But it was, it was a lot for my body to process physically, mentally, emotionally.

Nick Urban [00:03:24]:
So what are the different types of dry fast and what’s going on inside the body once you start one or the other?

Theo Lucier [00:03:30]:
It’s a great question. So let’s start here. Why would you want to dry fast instead of wet fast? And the reason why is because wet fasting isn’t really a fast. It’s actually a water diet. So anytime you swallow water, it activates your digestive system. And when your digestive system is activated and you’re not taking food in just water, your body does something called gluconeogenesis, which breaks down fat for glycerol. And that converts the glycerol or, sorry, that, that’s the dry fasting in gluconeogenesis. You’re.

Theo Lucier [00:04:09]:
When you wet fast, your body is breaking down muscle tissue and vital tissue. And vital tissue is organ tissue for energy. It takes it apart, uses it for glucose. And so the longer you wet fast, the more muscle tissue you lose and the more organ tissue you lose. And there are organs that are mostly muscle, like your heart, so that gets very impacted and, you know, other tissues. Like, do you really want to be losing bowel tissue? Liver, kidney? Like, probably not. So when you dry fast and you’re not activating the digestive system at all, it signals your hypothalamus to unlock this biochemical pathway that we’ve had probably since, you know, the beginning of, you know, us as a species on this planet. And it’s a special switch that flips and it does exactly what you mentioned earlier in the call.

Theo Lucier [00:05:07]:
It starts shredding the fat for water. So 100 grams of fat is broken down and it’s converted into 115 grams of water. And that comes from within. So that is the water aspect. And then it shreds old scar tissue, senescent cells, which are we call zombie cells. They’re, they’re underperforming cells that are kind of old, basically, and it tears them apart and it uses them for, you know, another source of energy, glycerol, which it then uses in a ketogenic process. So think of it just to simplify it because, you know, there’s a lot of biochemistry geeks out there for Anyone listening to this? If you want to do a deep, deep, deep dive into the biochemical pathways, you can always read August Dunning’s book on dry fasting, the Phoenix Protocol, which, which, which we love. We recommend it.

Theo Lucier [00:05:58]:
He’s great dude. He’s got a great YouTube channel. But the long and the short of it is if you don’t activate your digestive system, it flips a switch, you go into radical autophagy. Your fat starts getting burned up and shredded and used for water and energy, and then it goes through and it dissolves other tissue that isn’t helpful. So old cells, scar tissue. There’s a lot of reports in the literature of, of tumors and cysts being shredded, taken apart, stuff like that. So that’s, that’s kind of the. The gist of what happens in a dry fast.

Nick Urban [00:06:35]:
And then in that process, how does your body know which cells to target in order to break them down for fuel?

Theo Lucier [00:06:41]:
That’s your body’s own native healing intelligence. You know, it’s. It’s. We have this switch, I think, as it’s. It’s in us, you know, probably from time immemorial. It’s a healing mechanism. If you look at animals in nature, or even animals on a farm like I grew up on, when they’re injured, they will go somewhere by themselves and hole up in a cave or hole up in a corner, or in the case of a friend’s cat who was injured, went into a kitchen cabinet that was, you know, ground level and was just in there for three days, you know, not eating, not drinking, just healing, and then pops out at the end of three days, rehydrates, eats, and is good to go. It’s a healing mechanism that was inbuilt in us, not only for, you know, injury healing, but also probably times of starvation because it just.

Theo Lucier [00:07:35]:
It flips a switch. You start using everything in your body that’s not that helpful, like fat tumors, senescent cells, broken strands of DNA, misfolded proteins. All of those start getting used for energy.

Nick Urban [00:07:49]:
Yeah, it makes sense that the body would have some kind of accounting mechanism where it can look through and figure out, okay, is this cell over here holding its weight? Is it contributing to the survival of the organism as a whole? If yes, let it be. If not, like, let’s find the weaker ones, the ones that are either. They’ve either gone astray or are at least neutral. And we can preferentially use these before we start breaking down the healthy ones.

Theo Lucier [00:08:11]:
That’s a perfect way to do it. It’s like a balance sheet, right? And then your body takes stock of everything and says, okay, like you’ve got some weird scar tissue in your gut or you’ve got some weird stuff going on there. Let’s, let’s just go and fix that and use it for energy. You know, you’ve got a bunch of broken DNA. Let’s go and, let’s go and fix that. You’ve got a bunch of cells that are underperforming. Let’s use those for energy. You know, it’s an easy way to explain.

Theo Lucier [00:08:42]:
Dry fasting is sleep. And it kind of catches people off guard. But sleep for most people is, is a 7, 8, 9, 10 hour dry fast. And when you sleep, that’s when you, you know, consolidate your memories. That’s when the glymphatic system in your brain, which is your brain’s own lymphatic system for clearing waste out, drains and it drains through your neck into the greater lymphatic system. That’s when all the cells recover. If you’re really into fitness, that’s when your muscles grow. It’s just.

Theo Lucier [00:09:13]:
And that’s a dry fast. So think of the healing state of sleep being extended into days, should you choose. There’s different levels of, of dry fasting. You know, you can do intermittent dry fasting, you know, one to three days and you can go, you know, five or seven or in Russia, clinically they’ll do an 11 day dry fast with people that have a really serious condition. And the reason you would, the main reason you would want to do a longer dry fast is for the stem cell benefit.

Nick Urban [00:09:44]:
Touch on those, what happens with stem cells.

Theo Lucier [00:09:47]:
Well, so another really fascinating part about this ancient survival mechanism, ancient healing mechanism, is that it is pretty much the only way to get a 100% endogenous, completely natural, full body stem cell treatment, which is really amazing if you think about it. I mean, we can go down to Mexico, we can pay 30, 40, $50,000 for a stem cell treatment where they suck, you know, stuff out of your body and spin it in a centrifuge and isolate it and they inject it back in, which isn’t really that natural of a process, right? And a lot of those diet the injection site in dry fasting, should you go long enough, there is a special cycle that happens that releases pluripotent stem cells, which are the ones that can turn into anything from the long bones of your legs and they go into circulation and they just start fixing stuff. And that lasts for months afterwards.

Nick Urban [00:10:50]:
Stem cell Science is kind of confusing. It’s like you want it, you have to like release and mobilize and do all these different things to get them to work properly. And I know if you do it wrong in certain circumstances, like you, you’re overly taxing your stem cell pools. That can also be a bad thing. And there are certain supplements that claim to help you do this. And it’s like they recommend you take it every single day. But if you do that, you, you’re not gonna be letting your body operate naturally. And with dry fasting, there is a big stem cell, I don’t know terminology, release.

Nick Urban [00:11:19]:
How do you make sure that you’re

Theo Lucier [00:11:21]:
doing it the right way in dry fasting?

Nick Urban [00:11:24]:
Yeah. So you’re not gonna be depleting yourself and causing long term issues of like having a, an exhausted stem cell pool.

Theo Lucier [00:11:33]:
Don’t do a long dry fast too often. We do have people that sometimes do a longer dry fast, which is a five to seven day. And they feel so good, they’re just like, I want to do one right away. And the general rule of thumb is it should be a six month break in between. That’s about as frequently as you’d want to do a five or seven day. Now, intermittent dry fasting is different, what we call short dry fasts. You can do a one, two or three day dry fast pretty often, but you’re not gonna get the stem cell benefit. To get the stem cell benefit, you gotta go through a five or a seven day.

Theo Lucier [00:12:10]:
On a five day, you get one wave, one cycle of stem cell release. On a seven day, you actually get two, which is pretty neat. And that’s. And I’ve done both, you know, I’ve done both five days and seven days. I don’t know if I’m in a hurry to do an 11 day. I’m not really struggling with anything, you know, crazy chronic right now. But I’ll tell you what, I’m curious, I’m curious. I.

Theo Lucier [00:12:39]:
My seven day was one of the hardest ones I’ve ever done and I could not imagine adding four days to that. But if you got a serious condition, and you know, I rarely say stuff like this because I’m, I’m kind of anti medical industrial complex, but I think if you had an informed medical professional, you would want them monitoring you daily at least after the fifth day. If you were to do an 11 day. But if you go through the Russian literature, which thankfully we can start translating more of it with AI these days almost. And for people listening, nearly 100% of all literature on dry fasting is in Russia. In Russian, because that’s who’s been doing the research since I think the 1960s or 70s, I think 70s. And so, you know, it’s kind of hard to access in English, but they’ve had some really amazing outcomes with the 11 day dry fast.

Nick Urban [00:13:39]:
Who are some of those? Like prominent researchers. Like, I think there’s Dr. Philov is one of them and then there’s a couple others.

Theo Lucier [00:13:43]:
Yeah, there’s Filanov, there’s Dr. Shechenikov. Gosh. Who’s. There’s a, there’s a couple other ones. If you read the, the Phoenix protocol, the few of them are referenced in there. There’s a female dry fasting expert in Russia, Valerie something. But I couldn’t find anything in English on her.

Theo Lucier [00:14:04]:
It was, it was really challenging.

Nick Urban [00:14:06]:
Well, if I find more, I’ll put them in the show notes for this episode. I’m curious how this has changed your approach to hydration on a daily basis. I’ve heard you call the short term dry fast the AK47 of fat loss. Are you doing anything differently now with your approach to hydration? Like most conventional wisdom or advice is as soon as you wake up because you’ve gone eight hours, give or take, of sleep in a dry fasted state, a dehydrated state people will call it. Then it’s like the first thing, the first recommendation is before you can get out of bed, drink a huge thing of water. Are you doing that or are you delaying your water or what?

Theo Lucier [00:14:41]:
I have two things to say about that. So one, after your first dry fast, your cells are running really efficiently, they’re optimized. And so nearly universally everybody reports needing less water throughout the day after their first dry fast. Like you’re, you. You know, a lot of us were over hydrated and there’s a lot of reasons for that. We don’t really need to get into it, but we’re drinking water all day, right. And it just, sometimes it feels like it just goes right through us. And the funny thing is after a dry fast, you just don’t need as much.

Theo Lucier [00:15:16]:
And I think it’s because your cells, they have younger, healthier membranes. Everything is functioning optimally at a cellular level. So it just uses the water more efficiently. So you don’t need as much. That usually wears off for most people around probably, I would say five, six months, ish. And then they’re kind of back to their normal intake and then the AK47 of dry fasting. Yeah. So you know I think it was Dr.

Theo Lucier [00:15:44]:
Filanoff. You know, he runs a dry fasting clinic in Russia and they have this weight loss program now, this has been studied clinically for decades and the weight loss, weight loss program for them and this is pretty hardcore and I’ll tell you my experience with it. So you do a 24 hour dry fast. So that’s basically for most people it’s lunch to lunch or dinner to dinner. You know, it’s just 24 hours and then you do a 10 kilometer walk while you’re dry fasted. So that’s 6.2 miles and you do that twice per day. And they’re twice per day or twice per week or sorry, twice per week. Oh, okay.

Theo Lucier [00:16:26]:
You do do that twice per week. And weight loss is, is guaranteed. Fat loss is guaranteed. And they have people lose like 45 pounds in like two, three months because it comes off naturally. It’s not like this dramatic crash diet thing and then it stays off. So I haven’t had time to do it twice per week, but for the last month I’ve been doing it once a week. I just, just did it yesterday and I’m very pleased with the results. So I’ll tell you right off the bat, it’s kind of a pain in the butt.

Theo Lucier [00:17:00]:
Like you gotta schedule around it. Your day is not the same. People don’t realize that we have all these rituals that are a nice mental break around eating and drinking. Like I love waking up and making an herbal tea or making a cacao or having, you know, humic and folvic in my water. Like I love it, you know, I love the little breaks you get for snacks and stuff like that. So that’s gone. And, and if you’re a coffee drinker, that ritual is gone. Right? And it’s good to take a break from caffeine as well.

Theo Lucier [00:17:34]:
But that, that’s gone. So you have that kind of mental foundation of during the day and then, you know, walking that long, it’s about two hours. So it’s, it’s, it’s a two hour thing. And I’ve played around with the schedule. I think it’s best to just wake up and get into it. Just wake up, go do your 10k, walk 6.2 miles and then come back and then do the rest of your day. And it is, I’ve been doing dinner to dinner, but recently I switched lunch to lunch. So on the day before my last fluids and you know, food is, is at lunch and then the next day I can start refeeding and re eating by lunch, which is a lot more enjoyable because you just wake up, you do your walk, you do, you know, a few hours of work or whatever you need to do for the day, and then you’re, you’re already back in it.

Theo Lucier [00:18:23]:
And I’m really pleased with the results. Man. It, you get a gut reset. So you know, it helps the tight junctions in the gut close up. If you have any inflammation there, if you have any bloating because, you know, whatever you ate something your body can’t digest that well, that’s all gone. And it’s a nice break for your liver. You know, you burn up all that glucose that your liver’s holding, that’s gone. And it’s just, it’s like a nice little mini reset.

Theo Lucier [00:18:55]:
And I wanted to extend, I just finished a five day dry fast, like a month, that’s probably about six weeks ago now. And I wanted to maintain and extend the benefits of it. And so far it seems to be doing that. I’m down 7 pounds of visceral fat, which I measured with RJL Systems Quantum 5. It’s a bio electrical analysis device. They use them in laboratories. Got one on ebay. I was thrilled to find it.

Theo Lucier [00:19:27]:
But basically it just runs a little bit of DC current through your body and it, it, it can measure your body fat composition, you know, your, your muscle, your muscles, your, your, the tone of your cells, which is called phase angle. And so I’m tracking it this whole time and I’m like, you know, at 48 what I am now, it’s not as easy to lose that deep visceral fat. Right? Like, it takes a lot of effort. And here I just did a five day dry fast that came off and now it’s slowly going down, even doing it once a week. So I’m pretty happy with it.

Nick Urban [00:20:02]:
Do you measure like your cortisol or any like measures of stress? Like my main concern about like regular fasting of any kind, whether it’s wet fasting or dry fasting, would be that like nervous system dysregulation and specifically like elevated cortisol and stress hormones. How do you address that?

Theo Lucier [00:20:18]:
Well, so here’s what we’ve found and here’s what we’ve seen in the, in the groups. So we have a lot of water diet or wet faster people that get into this and nearly universally all of them comment that dry fasting is easier. So wet fasting, they’re super hungry all the time. They may not be thirsty, but they’re really hungry and they tend to have a lot of headaches and their body feels stressed, like they’re exhibiting stressful signs from that dry fasting. And I know this sounds crazy, but you’re not hungry and you’re not thirsty, but that’s just gone. And I would say it’s about 80% of people don’t get headaches. And I’m specifically talking about caffeine drinkers. And the other 20% do on the first day and then it’s gone.

Theo Lucier [00:21:11]:
I’m one of the 20%. I usually get a headache on the first day and then after that it’s gone. But you’re not hungry, you’re not thirsty, and you’re not stressed. Like, the best feeling I can give you about dry fasting is you get a very deep sense of presence. Time slows down a lot. It’s just everything kind of pulls in. Your attention’s not scattered. You’re, you’re very grounded into yourself, especially the first three days, and you’re very present.

Theo Lucier [00:21:44]:
So we haven’t run into the cortisol response that you would expect. I, you know, know it’s again, it’s an extension of sleep. So you’re dry fasting when you’re sleeping and, and that’s not a high cortisol time for most people.

Nick Urban [00:21:59]:
Yeah. I wonder if by activating the digestive system, you’re creating in some way or another, like, or aggravating that stress response. Like perhaps it’s through like the glps or it’s like other hormones are being produced when you activate the digestive system that you don’t get if you’re not activating it.

Theo Lucier [00:22:15]:
It’s a good point. You know, I have water fasted and I’ve done long water fasts and I felt weak and malnourished and weird the whole time, especially afterwards. And you know, nowadays as, as, you know, somebody over 45, you know, it’s like I want to maintain muscle as much as I can for as long as I can. So definitely wouldn’t do a water fast for those reasons. But in terms of how it feels and the cortisol response, I haven’t, I haven’t had that during a dry fast. The wet fast that I’ve done, it’s kind of like your energy spikes and then it goes down and spikes and it goes down and you have these like weird cycles and swings and it’s kind of intense. And a dry fast is kind of this slow contraction inward over the days. You know, for a normal dry fast, the hardest day is day three.

Theo Lucier [00:23:10]:
If you do a five day. The hardest one is day three, because your first two days, you just burn through all the glucose that your liver’s got stored up. And then day three, you switch over to ketone metabolism. But that takes half a day, usually for most people. And most people are pretty lethargic and tired on day three. And then by the end of day three, they get a pickup in energy because of the ketones. And then the last two days, you’re, you know, day four, you get your stem cell release, and day five, you know, you’re ending it that day. So that one’s pretty easy.

Nick Urban [00:23:43]:
Yeah, because the big criticism that people tend to have these days about fasting in general, and it’s usually, like, applied to wet fasting because dry fasting is still not popular. It’s the loss of lean tissue, which is aggravated and caused by the. The pathways are activated and also through the elevated stress hormone levels. So it seems like this might be a good way of getting the big things that have stopped people pursuing fasting in the name of longevity or just overall optimal health.

Theo Lucier [00:24:15]:
Yeah, I mean, I. I will never do wet fasts again. And unfortunately, I did it for a really long time. I was one meal a day for 16 years, and. Wow. Yeah. So I was fasting, you know, especially in the early days, like 24 hours, what water fasted. And I did have really elevated cortisol.

Theo Lucier [00:24:38]:
I actually got treated for it. This is before I went super deep into health. I was going to, like, kind of a naturopathic physician. And I was like, yeah, your cortisol is crazy high. You should consider, you know, eating more than once per day. And I was like, nope, I’m married to this diet. This is what I’m gonna do. It makes me more productive at the time as a commercial real estate broker and own my own company.

Theo Lucier [00:25:03]:
So I was responsible for everything all the time. And I didn’t want to eat during the day because it made me tired, you know, because you get that postprandial, you know, you want to sleep. And I had to be on the phone getting things done. So that. That’s why I got into that diet. And, you know, by the end of it, I, you know, I was kind of strung out. You know, it was like, that’s. If you lead a high cortisol life, what.

Theo Lucier [00:25:29]:
I mean, I know we’re all not supposed to, but hey, if in that industry, you’re. You’re gonna run into that. It, you know, not eating and basically, water fasting every day, all day was not Optimal.

Nick Urban [00:25:41]:
You mentioned weight loss. Whether going the intermittent route or the extended multi day dry fasting, one of the issues with a lot of modern interventions towards weight loss is that they don’t actually produce like sustainable, durable results like you stop whatever it is. I mean, the GLP1s are the perfect example. 40 to 60 weeks later you have regained almost all of the weight and also the cardio metabolic benefits that you were getting during the use itself. Those also dissipate in a similar timeframe. And it seems with dry fasting, you’re able to actually change your body weight and body fat set point. Because otherwise if you don’t change the set point every time you do something, whether it’s a crash diet or one of the more extreme aggressive interventions, your body just eventually over time comes back up. You put on the body fat, you put on the weight that you, that you had lost.

Nick Urban [00:26:32]:
So that’s why you see that like most people who go through a huge weight loss experience regain most if not all of it.

Theo Lucier [00:26:39]:
Well, you know, dry fasting, a longer dry fast is not, it’s not actually for weight loss. Like weight loss is a benefit of it, specifically fat loss, because that’s what it uses for energy and water. But doing a dry fast, the extended dry fast for weight loss is, is not the reason you do it. You do it for stem cells, you do it for an incredibly deep detox at a cellular level. You do it for old injury repair, you do it for the mental and emotional benefits which we can dive into later if you want. But the side effect is, is yeah, you, you will. Most people, they lose 4, 5, 6, 7 pounds of visceral fat and that’s just, it’s just gone. And so you have to look at an extended dry fast as you just slap the reset button and you got this blank slate.

Theo Lucier [00:27:30]:
So what are you going to do with it afterwards? Are you going to be eating hot Cheetos and Diet Coke or are you going to do a deep dive into what foods best assimilate to your body and eat only those? You know, I, I, I’m doing, I’m still in my reset period and I haven’t added caffeine, I haven’t added wheat back in. I’ve been eating really clean foods because I just want to, I feel like it, like I’m not attracted to, to eating all other stuff and it’s been a nice break, you know, so I would look at it as, it’s a, it’s a total reset and what you do with it afterwards is up to you. Now. I was an IM interested in losing some more body fat and I was like, well, I could just destroy myself doing, you know, hit workouts and that kind of stuff. And you know, there’s always that option. But, you know, once a week I’m gonna throw in a 24 hour dry fast and do the walk and see what happens. And, and you know, I would say for people that are really interested in, in weight loss and fat loss, like, try that. Just do it once a week.

Theo Lucier [00:28:42]:
You know, start there, do it, do it, do it four times and just see if you like the results.

Nick Urban [00:28:48]:
Okay. So we started off discussing what a dry fast is and the different types. One, like, hotly debated concept in the dry fasting community, if you can even say there is a community is, is whether or not you’re allowed to expose yourself to water. Not ingesting it orally, but to bathe in it. And there’s what’s called, I think, a hard dry fast versus a soft dry fast. What’s your stance there? Because I’ve read some work and a lot of people recommend that a soft wet fast, I think it’s called is. Okay, but then I also learned about something called aquaporins in the skin and that could potentially let water get into the body.

Theo Lucier [00:29:26]:
Yeah, you want that? There’s, there’s, I think it’s Philanov, don’t quote me if I’m wrong, but I believe he’s a huge advocate of hard dry fasts. And then you’ve got the other side, which is Shichenikov, who recommends cold water bathing, cold water splashes on your face, walking at dawn and dusk barefoot to soak up the dew through the soles of your feet. You know, it’s, it’s, I’ve done both, I’ve done, I’ve done a hard five day dry fast. I’ve done soft. Dr. August Dunning is, is a big fan of soft dry fasts. I prefer soft dry fast and recommend them. And the reason why is because people are so toxic now.

Theo Lucier [00:30:17]:
It’s not their fault. It’s just, it is what it is, right? We’re, we’re breathing in a lot of, a lot of bad stuff. And usually by the time somebody gets around to doing dry fasts in their life, they have decades of accumulation. So it can be pretty stressful on the detox pathways to not have some support during the dry fast. And a really easy way to support it. Like one of the things we teach and in our program, dry Fast with friends, is doing 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide bath. So for anybody listening, if you just wanna go do it on your own, get 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide, take two cups, put it in your bathtub and soak in the bath for an hour. And that’s an active form of oxygen that goes through the skin.

Theo Lucier [00:31:06]:
And some of the water goes through the skin. Hardly any, but some of it does. And what that does is it increases the osmotic pressure on the cell membrane and it pushes some water through and it helps eject toxins from the inside of the cell where they do the most damage. A lot of people don’t know this, but dry fasting is one of the only ways to remove deuterium from the inside of your cell’s mitochondria. And it does it really fast. It ejects a lot of it out quite quickly. And so, you know, if you want to remove deuterium and other accumulated toxins from your cells, it’s good to give it a little bit of support. I personally feel that a cold shower is it.

Theo Lucier [00:31:48]:
Dude, it feels amazing when you’re dry fasting. It’s so vitalizing. I do put tape over the mouth. You don’t want any water in the mouth. You don’t brush your teeth, you know, whether you soft or hard, dry fast, you know that you don’t want to brush your teeth. There’s a white filter film of immune system cells that develop over your gums and your teeth. And they’re doing work we’ve had. People have had latent dental infections that they discovered from a dry fast because there was all this pain and localization of white film in one area.

Theo Lucier [00:32:21]:
And they go get it checked out and they have a cavitation there from an old botched wisdom tooth extraction where they didn’t remove the periodontal ligament, they just left it in. It’s been festering for, you know, years. So we’re fans, Sean and I, you know, Sean McCormick and I, my, my co founder of Dry Fast with Friends. We, we love this off dry Faster Dave, he’s going into the Puget Sound when he dry fast and waiting around. And this last one I did hard though. I wanted to see what it was like and I think it was fine. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like harder, it wasn’t easier, it just was, it was fine. But I want to get the most toxins out of my cells as possible.

Theo Lucier [00:33:05]:
And absorbing a little bit of water through the skin or, or even enemas, you know, there’s, there’s there’s also. Do you want to talk about that? Sure. Okay. So, you know, August Dunning, and I believe it’s. They recommend doing enemas usually on day three or four of a dry fast. And the thinking behind that, and this is for some people, not all. I didn’t, didn’t do one, my last one, so I didn’t need to. But if you’re not completely evacuated from your bowels before you start a dry fast, that material gets used for water.

Theo Lucier [00:33:45]:
So your body pulls all the water out and it turns into like concrete, basically. And then it’s just sitting there for, you know, for days, which isn’t great. So it’s good to, you know, irrigate that and have it come out. And that’s the idea behind that. Now, there’s other ways to avoid this. You know, we teach how to do a psyllium husk cleanse to kind of remove a lot of that material before you even go into the dry pass. But there’s also the saltwater flush method that some people like to do where it just completely blows everything out. You.

Theo Lucier [00:34:18]:
You could do that with Epsom salt too. You do that the day before, you know, but the general idea is like, if you don’t go out and gorge on some crazy meal the night before, you, you probably aren’t going to need to do an enema. Some people choose to do them, but I would say it’s less than half that we’ve worked with. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:34:43]:
And they Recommend on day 3 for what reason? Why that far into it?

Theo Lucier [00:34:47]:
It’s. It’s different for everyone, but by then you can usually tell it’s there because it’s sucked all the water out of it. And so it’s like, it’s kind of. It can be mildly uncomfortable for some people, but then they try to get it out and they can’t get it out because it’s just, it’s like really dry. You know, it’s just, it’s just in there. So you know that that’s where it can be useful. And some people like to get a little more experimental with it. You know, maybe do like a 1% solution of food grade hydrogen peroxide and do that.

Theo Lucier [00:35:19]:
I don’t. Yeah. Which I’ve done. You know, you don’t, you don’t really want to go above 1%. But was it dramatically life changing? Not really. It just kind of helped clean it out more. I would say the hydrogen peroxide bath or. We even teach people how to do food grade nebulization.

Theo Lucier [00:35:41]:
Have you have you done that? Have we talked about that?

Nick Urban [00:35:43]:
I did that in 2020.

Theo Lucier [00:35:46]:
Yeah. Yeah, I figured you were on that already.

Nick Urban [00:35:48]:
Yeah, I have a nebulizer somewhere around here. I haven’t talked about it actually. No, I think I had a podcast with Dr. Thomas Levy. Levy, a. A long time ago about that. And after that I started using it, but I haven’t done it since.

Theo Lucier [00:36:00]:
You know, Levy’s who got me into it. I interviewed him and I was like, I gotta get on this. And we ended up adding it to our protocol for the dry fast. So, you know, because you’re not activating your digestion, you inhale through the nose, goes into your lungs, the active oxygen goes into your bloodstream. And during a dry fast, your bloodstream is filled with crap basically like toxins that are getting ejected from the cells that go into the interstitial fluid. That’s between the cells, which goes into lymph, which goes into your bloodstream. And this cleans your blood and your lymph while you’re doing it. It’s wonderful, it’s.

Theo Lucier [00:36:44]:
We highly recommend it.

Nick Urban [00:36:46]:
I’m glad you brought that up. I was going to actually ask you about all of this because the preparation and going in, knowing what’s going to happen and going in as less toxic as possible, as clean as possible, makes everything infinitely easier. But then also the more stuff that you liberate and is floating through your bloodstream, the harder it’s going to be and the most, the more dangerous it’s going to be. You don’t want to like liberate a bunch of heavy metals and like toxic chemicals and then have those for days in the body if you don’t have to. So leading into a dry fast, how do you recommend people proceed?

Theo Lucier [00:37:20]:
It’s a great point. And that is one of the contraindications. You know, we don’t think that people who have absolutely never done a detox before and are constantly exposed to large amounts of toxins should do a dry fast. Like you don’t need to jump into one. What you need to do is a gentle long term detox protocols. If it’s metals, you know, you need to get into EDTA and humiramide and some of the under other, you know, chelators and binders, you know, diatomaceous earth for aluminum. Right. And you know, do that for a year or two.

Theo Lucier [00:37:59]:
Um, sounds crazy, but you wouldn’t believe. Well actually you would believe, you know, how many metals people have in their bodies. And you know, there’s six PPD from tires Right. So when tires break down, they release this horrific rubber preservative into the air. It gets aerosolized and it kills like it literally kills large vertebrate fish in the Pacific Northwest that live underneath bridges that a lot of cars go underneath and they find it in a tissue and these, these are like salmon. It kills them. Right. So they’re, what is it doing to us? So, you know, if you live next to like i5 in California and you’re breathing that in all the time, you need to do, you know, like a sauna and niacin detox and probably three or four of them before you get into doing a dry fast.

Nick Urban [00:38:48]:
Because what you’re mentioning here, that’s only one chemical of the many that are in tires. And tires are not the only source. So there’s a ton of different things. It makes sense to have some kind of like thorough protocol or at least consistent long term protocol in place first.

Theo Lucier [00:39:01]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean I had done sauna and niacin detoxes and heavy metals chelation for a long time before I got into a dry fast. Now if you’re eating healthy, you’re not constantly exposed to toxins, like you’re not a welder, you know, breathing in metals constantly, and you’ve done some amount of detox of some kind of at any point in your life, then you may want to consider a dry fast. Now we do have a pre talks program for people like that. It’s not, excuse me, it’s not super intense, it’s pretty gentle. It’s based on using charcoal and psyllium husk and a few other things. It mechanically moves out a lot of the waste material that’s, let’s just call it what it is, impacted feces that are stuck in the colon. So it moves all that out and then the charcoal starts to, it grabs a lot of The Vol.

Theo Lucier [00:40:01]:
The VOCs of all volatile organic chemicals and like kind of just other surface chaff that people will have floating around in their bloodstream. You know, charcoal has not removed metals and I decided not to add a metal scalation protocol in because once you start that going, it accelerates. It’s like a snowball and it’s really intense. And so we felt that it was better to just get the surface stuff, move the mechanical waste out, do what we can. And then after the dry fast, for people who want it like in, in our private group, we help them know, use the right binders for the metals they want to move out and just kind of maintain the slate, they’re on. Now, when you do a dry fast, your urine goes up every day, which is really weird, but the volume goes up and it gets, it gets crazier every day the way it looks like there’s so much sediment that comes out. And so that stuff is being aggressively pushed out during a dry fast. And your blood’s pretty thin, thick, so it’s not circulating a ton.

Theo Lucier [00:41:16]:
Right. So it’s not going around and, and you know, harming a lot of organs. Your body knows what to do. It’s going to move it out. Some people even have bowel movements without an enema and move stuff out. Looks like an orange goo.

Nick Urban [00:41:30]:
Okay, so the, you have the pre tox situation and you recommend people start like they go through some kinds of detoxes on their own before the program, ideally so that they’re coming in in a less toxic state. Because when you break down fat cells, you’re going to be liberating all kinds of stuff. Glyphosate and heavy metals and who knows what else.

Theo Lucier [00:41:49]:
All of it. Yeah. I mean, we recommend that you’re somebody that’s really into health. And so far that’s kind of been the audience we’ve had. These are people who, you know, are into health, have probably done some sort of detox at some point. They eat clean, they try to stay away from chemicals. Like you know, that’s, that’s the, the right kind of, of person who can just go right into a dry fast. You know, if, if you’ve never eaten clean, you’re exposed to a lot of chemicals and toxins.

Theo Lucier [00:42:19]:
And then now you should probably start by doing something else. But, and, and if you still want to dry fast, you just, you’re excited, you jumped into it. Just do a 24 hour. Cause you’re gonna get. It only takes 24 hours to grow a one cell thick new lining on your gut. See, you get this massive gut benefit and it’s not gonna slam your body into this hard detox.

Nick Urban [00:42:47]:
Yeah, that’s a good approach. And I did a three day last year and it was surprisingly difficult. And like you said earlier, physiologically I didn’t feel hungry or thirsty like, right. Like an average. But psychologically like the ritual of everything and like not.

Theo Lucier [00:43:03]:
It’s hard.

Nick Urban [00:43:03]:
I can’t do it. The deprivation was the hard part. But one of the first things I noticed afterward immediately is that everything tasted more, I guess vivid, you could say more intense. And also my gut felt like, felt fresh. I felt like I had, I don’t know how to describe what A fresh gut lining feels like. Yes, it felt like. That was one of the first things I knew, I observed, I felt. And then I looked into it and indeed that seems to be a common thing.

Theo Lucier [00:43:30]:
Yeah, it is, it’s. I mean, maybe tmi, but people are into dry fasting, are into this. Like every time I do a longer dry fast, for months afterwards, my BMS are smaller. I did some research on it because it’s pretty much the same volume of food. It’s because my gut and digestion is working so well. It’s just breaking the food down, pulling the nutrients out and leaving less waste material behind because everything’s just functioning at a higher efficiency. And I did notice after this last one, you know, sometimes when I eat, I would just get tired and this time I was eating and getting energy from it, like how it was when I was a kid, you know, it’s like, it’s pretty amazing. And yeah, three days, phenomenal.

Theo Lucier [00:44:19]:
Because that’s as long as you can go before you cross the Rubicon. Because, you know, once you go past day three and you enter day four, then you can’t stop until you’re at day five or you interrupt the stem cell cycle. So day three is like the maximum gut reset without being committed to a five.

Nick Urban [00:44:37]:
Exactly. And so I wanna walk through that now because that’s something that we haven’t really touched on, how important it is to exit properly and like to either go three or longer than five, I think it is. But before that, say, leading up to the experience itself, before you dry fast, say you’re two weeks out, what should you be doing or considering, how do you prepare for it? Then one week out, then the day before? Like, what does that actual timeline look like?

Theo Lucier [00:45:01]:
Yeah, I mean, it depends how much time you have on your hands and what resources you have access to. But at a minimum, you should be taking, you know, four or five grams of vitamin C a day, which is going to neutralize a lot of the active toxins in your bloodstream. You should be up on your minerals.

Nick Urban [00:45:19]:
Whether you with these things too, like, say the vitamin C, are you distributing the dose throughout the day, or are you taking, let’s say 3 grams at once and 2, 2 grams another time? Or like, are you doing 1 gram, 1 gram, 1 gram? Throughout the day?

Theo Lucier [00:45:32]:
No, I do it all at once for two reasons. So I do it at night and at night. When you take vitamin C at night and you go to sleep, it helps stimulate collagen production more at night than it does in the morning. And So I, I just. And my body’s already dry fasting and detoxing at night. So I want to support that with the vitamin C as like the lymph, you know, discharges its waste into the bloodstream, then the vitamin C is waiting for it to, you know, grab it and neutralize it. So that, that’s why I do it at night. It’s just, it’s.

Theo Lucier [00:46:06]:
Oh. And the other reason is the. Is working out. So I try to work out every day. I don’t always get there, but that’s the intent. And if you work out, it creates a hormetic stress on the body. It creates free radicals. And if you take vitamin C within two hours before or after working out, it damps the free radicals, it neutralizes them, and you don’t get the hormetic signal from the working out to improve like that.

Theo Lucier [00:46:36]:
I think it was. What was it like, the triathlon community figured this out, like, because they had guys taking massive amounts of vitamin C and then they weren’t seeing good results from their training. Yeah, that was a whole thing.

Nick Urban [00:46:49]:
So vitamin C leading up a couple weeks out. That’s a good idea. What else going into it?

Theo Lucier [00:46:54]:
I mean, look, if you really want to enhance your experience, like, I mean, let’s say you have access to an infrared sauna, you should be doing a sauna niacin detox for at least eight days. That would be phenomenal. You know, if you don’t have access to that, that’s okay. But if you do, asana and niacin detox would go a really long way towards pulling a lot of crap out of your body, you know, before you get into it. We have people that like to be in ketosis before they start. And so by the time they start the dry fast, they’re already in a ketotic state. And it accelerates and deepens their whole experience. I’ve done that before.

Theo Lucier [00:47:35]:
It’s not necessary. It does make it a lot harder physically. You’re really in it. And then we have. We even have people. And I’ve done this too, just to see what it was like where they get into ketosis. And then the final day they do a water fast. So there’s no.

Theo Lucier [00:47:55]:
Their body’s not processing anything. And, you know, they go into it already water fasted, which is pretty extreme. I don’t think it’s necessary because people forget that recovering from a dry fast is more important than the dry fast itself. And you’re doing a water fast for three days after your dry fast, as you recover and by water fast, I mean you’re taking in broth, you’re, you know, you’re getting minerals, you’re getting, you’re getting good stuff. So it’s, it’s really like two or three days. But yeah, it’s, it’s, you’re rehydrating for the first couple days. You have to be so careful with how you exit a dry fast because you can not only reverse all your gains, you can actually hurt yourself. And I can expand on that if you’d like.

Nick Urban [00:48:46]:
Yeah, that’s a really important one and I think that’s important takeaway in general is that like it matters less about how you go into it and even what you do during it, but the way you exit it and when you exit it, you don’t want to exit it right during the stem cell release. You want to either exit it before or after. And then also you don’t want to just jump straight back into like your favorite go to meal. You’re not going to be able to and it’s going to like really take a toll. Especially if your favorite meal is something that’s unhealthy or processed or high glycemic or whatever.

Theo Lucier [00:49:14]:
Yeah, well, luckily dry fasting has this effect of removing habits that don’t serve you. And we’ve had so many people that are really into a food that isn’t necessarily great for them and they just don’t want it anymore. Uh, you know, my own recent example is I was probably doing a little too much caffeine in the months leading up to my dry fast. Um, I mean, why not? I love it, right? It makes you productive. It feels good. I love the ritual. Like a cortado in the morning, a matcha green tea in the afternoon. So good.

Theo Lucier [00:49:51]:
But it wasn’t serving me as becoming kind of dependent on it, even if it was just psychological. And that’s completely gone. Like I have no desire to get into it in the months coming. Will I get into it again? Probably, maybe, you know, but for now I’m, I’m happy not having it. So as far as how you exit, there’s, there’s two major things to be aware of. So if you have any sugar in that five day period, really the three day window afterwards is the most critical. You can stress your pancreas, which causes some damage there, and you spike your insulin so hard that your body just starts stacking on fat like crazy. And so you can, you literally have this body that is prime to just stack on fat.

Theo Lucier [00:50:45]:
So it’s really important to not have any sugar. And yes, some things convert into sugar when you eat them. But we have a special cookbook we had a professional paleo and organic chef make that gives you all the recipes so you don’t have to worry about that. But that’s a big one. And then the other thing is over hydrating too rapidly. I would say about 20, 30% of people kind of struggle not to drink the, the water too fast. It just, it feels so good, it tastes so good. But if you drink it too fast, you can cause edema.

Theo Lucier [00:51:26]:
Like your whole body will swell up because it just can’t process large volumes of water. It’s just, it’s like a shock to the system. Right. And so we recommend that you take 8 ounces of water that’s mineralized and you sip it over 20, 30 minutes. Just little sips, let it assimilate, you feel into it, you can feel it go through your whole body. Those are kind of the two main things. After that, you know, you want to layer in foods that are easily digestible. At first you don’t want to go straight into like wheat obviously, um, cause that does convert into a ton of sugar.

Theo Lucier [00:52:06]:
It can be hard to digest. Um, but you know, you don’t want to have like a raw kale salad either and get, you know, irritate the gut. So it’s like you kind of gotta layer in this stuff slowly. But then after, if you do a five day dry fast, your recovery is, you know, five days and you know by day four or five, you’re kind of more or less back to normal. If you do a seven day, it’s, it’s seven days. You know, you really gotta pace yourself. But should you stick to that plan, you’ve got, you know, stem cells for the next four, five, six months circulating in your body. You’re supporting those.

Theo Lucier [00:52:45]:
We have a special stem cell smoothie recipe that everybody loves and literally supports them. You don’t get edema, you’re not stacking on fat right away. You’re maintaining the anti inflammatory benefit of a dry fast. You know, one of the reasons that your body heals so much during a dry fast is because it drops the inflammation to a very low level. People forget, but anywhere there’s inflammation in the body, there’s a lot of water. Any inflamed area is. It’s inflamed, it’s red, it’s swollen. That requires water.

Theo Lucier [00:53:18]:
So what happens when you remove the water? The inflammation’s not there. Like it, it, it sounds so simple, that it’s stupid, but that’s actually how it works. Like, you remove the water, your body can’t really be inflamed, so it just goes to work on fixing the problem. So you want to kind of maintain that moving forward. So, yeah, the. The recovery from a dry fast is, I would say, more important than how you go into it.

Nick Urban [00:53:47]:
Yeah. My own experience when I did my short three day one was that afterward, I had the water in my hand, and I had to really challenge myself not to just chug it because, like, I wanted to. And I just, like, sip, wait a little bit. Sip, wait a little bit. And it was not satisfying. Like, I felt like I was just, like, getting one drop at a time, and it wasn’t enough. Yeah, but it makes sense, like, from a evolutionary biology perspective, too, that you wouldn’t want to just introduce a bunch of water and. Or food right into the body afterward because your body has just gone without both for a long period of time.

Nick Urban [00:54:20]:
You introduce them, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, oh, I don’t know why I’m gonna eat this or I’m gonna get this next. So as a result, I’m gonna hoard it. I’m gonna pack on the fat, I’m gonna get edema, and that way, I’ll be better protected if something like this happens starting today or tomorrow.

Theo Lucier [00:54:34]:
That’s right. Yeah. I mean, my last five day, you know, it’s interesting. I’ve done a lot of dry fasts. My first couple ones, I just bounced back really fast during. And these last couple, it’s. The recovery period has actually taken longer, and it’s kind of like layers of an onion. There’s deeper and deeper healing that happens each dry fast you do.

Theo Lucier [00:54:59]:
And this last one, I mean, it took all five days. And then even by day seven, eight, I was like, man, I’m. I’m still kind of tired. There’s still some deep healing. And then, you know, day eight, nine, ten, I was like, let’s go. You know, I’m doing hill sprints. I’m feeling really good. My brain’s working great, you know, as all that kind of kind of effects.

Theo Lucier [00:55:22]:
So it felt really good. But I stuck to the protocol. I was like, I’ve had gut challenges most of my life. It’s always something that I’m working on. It was one of my pathways into natural health. And this. My intent for this dry fast is like, we’re fixing this gut. Like, let’s go.

Theo Lucier [00:55:41]:
I’m gonna support it. So I Did a kind of a new gut protocol this time and seems to really be working. I’m pretty happy with it.

Nick Urban [00:55:50]:
So you run dry fast with friends. Why, though, with friends? What does having community actually change about a protocol that’s this hard?

Theo Lucier [00:55:58]:
That is a great question. You know, Sean and I, the whole. This whole thing started. Cause I started talking about dry fasting on my newsletter, and I had a bunch of people just jump into it without doing any research whatsoever. And halfway through, they would panic and stop the dry fast during a stem cell cycle or refeed improperly and have some issues. And I would tell people, hey, just go get the Phoenix protocol. It’s all there. Some would.

Theo Lucier [00:56:36]:
Most of them wouldn’t, you know, and then. And then they were kind of disillusioned, right? And then Sean had dry fasted before, but I really pushed him to do it again. I was like. And he’d never done an extended one. And I kept. I had told him about a year before, and then I did another one. I’m like, hey, man, you gotta do this, you gotta do it, you gotta do it, you gotta do it. And then he finally.

Theo Lucier [00:57:01]:
I was like, you get stem cells? And he’s like, oh, okay. Because he’s got kind of a bummed shoulder. And so then he did one, and then he was blown away. And he started talking about it on his newsletter. And then he had the same thing happen. A bunch of people just jumped in, did it with no preparation. And, you know, some of them had good outcomes, but a lot of them didn’t. They panicked.

Theo Lucier [00:57:22]:
They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to refeed. They didn’t know how to rehydrate. Some of them broke it in the middle of their stem cell cycle, which can retard your stem cell production for the next half of a year, which you don’t want to do. And so we were talking and we said, this needs a community, you know, so why don’t we just do a group? And, you know, both the folks. You know, both sets of folks that read our newsletters and communicate with us, we’ll just do it together, and we can just have a community and we can help people. And so it started off exactly like that. And we call it dry fast with friends.

Theo Lucier [00:58:01]:
Because, I mean, Sean and I are friendly guys. We’re friendly with everybody that does it. I mean, we feel like everyone that does a dry fast is friends. And then people that are in the group, you know, we have a group chat and stuff that people stay in Touch with that. It doesn’t turn off. You’re just in the group as long as you want to be. They communicate, they share stuff. And so everyone’s friends.

Nick Urban [00:58:24]:
How cool. And one thing that you probably have realized or know, that when people go through difficult situations together, whether it’s the military, it’s sports and the grueling training, that Trauma bonding. Exactly. That shared difficult experience creates deeper bonds.

Theo Lucier [00:58:40]:
Yeah, yeah. And people have crazy outcomes. You know, I mean, we’ve had people into their mid-80s. I think the youngest we’ve had is low 30s, you know, but it’s a really interesting group of people, and it’s people from all walks of life. Not all of them are like health people either. It’s really interesting. You know, we had a guy who. I’m not making any claims here, but we had a guy whose family has a history of cancer.

Theo Lucier [00:59:10]:
And he’s like, I just don’t want to get cancer. He’s like, so I’m going to do one of these a year and just, Just do a complete reset and, you know, get all the health benefits. And, you know, he’s never had. Had the big C, but every time he does one, it’s. It’s. He gets all his. His sleep improves. He had some dental stuff, resolve, you know, stuff like that, you know, and he’s just excited about it.

Nick Urban [00:59:34]:
What are some of the other things? I know we’re getting low on time, but, like, what are other community members seeing as a result of this? And of course, they’re not medical claims. They’re just experiences of people who have gone through the program.

Theo Lucier [00:59:46]:
Well, let’s go through the different aspects of life, you know, so I can go on and on about physical benefits and I’ll mention some really unique ones, but, you know, mental benefits. So a lot of people that do this, that struggle with procrastination, the procrastination’s gone. Afterwards, it’s just gone. People focus on what matters. Fasting, particularly dry fasting, seems to have this effect of shedding that which doesn’t serve you. So if you procrastinate, if you’re scrolling social media too much, that’s another one we hear about. It’s gone at least for a while, at least until you. You slow, slowly slide back into it.

Theo Lucier [01:00:29]:
But procrastination, social media, scrolling, gone. In the emotional realm, you know, we had a lady who was clinically depressed, had been for many, many years, and that was. That was gone. That was gone. And she is a practicing psychologist and has been for a really Long time. So she knows this isn’t somebody that’s self diagnosed. Like, you know, she, she knows what she’s talking about. And that is a common one we see emotionally, it seems to de age people in a helpful way where you kind of have.

Theo Lucier [01:01:07]:
You’re not as jaded and you’re not as negative. You’re just kind of excited about life. I would say that it’s like a positive expectation of the future. That’s a common one. That one I tend to get as well. You know, it’s, it’s. So there’s some emotional benefits, but that is probably the main one. I would say.

Theo Lucier [01:01:30]:
The other one is a sense of presence. It just seems to really make people present. You know, we have so much information flying at us at all times. It seems like our lives are so busy now. And there’s a presence that comes to you after you’ve completed the dry fast that you just can’t beat. You know, you can just sit somewhere and be absorbed in what you’re doing without constantly reaching for your phone or trying to distract yourself. On the physical side, Gosh. I mean, we had somebody who had a filling eject and the tooth grew in underneath.

Theo Lucier [01:02:11]:
Wasn’t a huge filling, you know, it wasn’t like a giant one that some dentists love to do. But it did fill in the excavated area of the tooth that the filling had previously occupied for, for men. We had a guy who had been on TRT for 15 years. He did have testicular shrinkage and they came back to full size in five days. We do hear a lot of hormonal benefits for people. It has a normalizing and balancing effect on hormones. You know me in particular, I used to be in a sport that was a full contact sport. I had a lot of head injuries.

Theo Lucier [01:02:51]:
Head injuries are super hard to repair. I had like 20, 25 year old head injuries go away. You know, there’s work. Every time I do a dry fast, there’s always work being done in the back of my head because it goes in, it remodels scar tissue. There’s. How do you know that brain’s working better? I didn’t go, I didn’t go to like Dr. Amen and have him inject radioactive sugar into my veins, which is what they use for that scan, by the way. I didn’t do that.

Theo Lucier [01:03:24]:
But you’re so in touch with your body when you do a dry fast, you can feel it. And every time I do one, it feels wet in the back. And then my brain’s just it’s firing, my memory’s better. And each time I do a dry fast, it improves a little bit more. So. But the first time I had a significant amount of sensation inside my skull. There’s no pain receptors on the brain, so I can’t say it hurt, but there was a lot going on that was, that was a big one. We’ve had a lot of parasite people.

Theo Lucier [01:04:05]:
You know, parasites don’t last in a body that’s not getting water or food. And they come out. And we had a lady who had them come out of her eyes, like the corners of her eyes and, and other areas of the body too that we don’t need to get into. But she had a lot come out. Sean, Sean McCormack had. Had some come out. There’s pictures of them on the website. So.

Theo Lucier [01:04:30]:
But yeah, parasites are a big one that we always get. And I mean, I could go on and on, you know, I mean, we have people who. You know what I do wanna talk about the energy thing. I’ll leave you at this last example. So, you know, dry fasting de ages and optimizes your cells and so this. And it also ejects a lot of deuterium. And you know, the whole deuterium story, it’s like, it’s like if your mitochondria are gears spinning around each other, it’s like throwing a wrench in them. And they can’t turn as well, so they don’t produce as much energy.

Theo Lucier [01:05:04]:
So you get rid of the deuterium, your cell membrane works better. You get this toxins out of the inside of the cell, everything’s working better, so you produce more energy. So we had a guy who had been doing the same mountain biking trail in the mountains behind his house somewhere in the west. And he’d never been able to clear a section in 10 years. And by clearing a section, it’s like a really steep pedal for a really long period of time. And he would always have to dismount, push it up and then, and then do the rest of it. And so this guy’s the oldest he’s ever been. After his recovery, it was about five, six days he went and did that trail and he cleared the section for the first time in a decade because he had more energy.

Theo Lucier [01:05:50]:
And so in my opinion, energy is the currency of life. If you have more energy, you’re in a better mood, you’re smarter, you process information faster, you can work out more, you can interact with more people and not be as tired, you can get more errands. Done, tests done. And so I would say out of all the benefits, having more energy is, is among the best. Maybe, maybe even the best. I don’t know, you know, but for me, that’s, that’s a huge part of it.

Nick Urban [01:06:22]:
That’s huge.

Theo Lucier [01:06:23]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:06:24]:
I mean, and if the body has more energy, your detoxification system works better, your brain works better, your muscles work better, everything works better.

Theo Lucier [01:06:32]:
Yep, a hundred percent.

Nick Urban [01:06:34]:
Awesome. Well, if people want to join the program, first of all, what you’ve alluded to several different things. Recipes and hand holding throughout the whole process. Community. What’s the deal with dry fast with friends? Specifically?

Theo Lucier [01:06:47]:
There’s a ton of stuff, but basically we have several options. So we have a DIY program that answers all the questions that Sean and I had when we did our first couple of dry fasts on our own that weren’t addressed anywhere we could find online or in books. So if somebody just wants to do a DIY one, they can do that. If somebody wants to do it, do a short dry fast. We have a free resource. You can just go to dryfastwithfriends.com and there’s a little box there. You can throw your email in it and you can get the Russian AK47 method of fat and weight loss. And it teaches you how to do short intermittent dry fast.

Theo Lucier [01:07:30]:
So one day, two day or three day, and you can just take that and use it. It’s free. There’s a DIY and then we have a live group program. There’s a couple different levels to it, but you know, the basic one, we have programs for the, the pre talks, we have the detox programs, how to do those during the dry fast. We have the whole thing, what to expect during your dry fast. Then we have the recovery protocol. Plus we had a professional chef who’s organic paleo, understands dry fasting, has done dry fasting, create our cookbook, which was huge. They’re all easy to make.

Theo Lucier [01:08:07]:
Recipes, broth recipe in there is phenomenal, really easy to do. But you can prepare that stuff before your dry fast, so it’s ready to go when you’re done, which is, which is pretty nice. And then of course we have the community, you know, we have a group chat that everybody’s in. And Sean and I also do a ton of health coaching. During the, during these, this program, there’s the group calls, of course, if you do the live group program. But on telegram too, we hop in there and help people with not just dry fasting, but anything. And between the two of us, you Know, we, we’ve got a lot of natural health stuff covered. And, you know, we did have a guy last time in January, he, he had.

Theo Lucier [01:08:55]:
What happens to some people is the body is burning out a latent infection that’s been in there for a long time. His heart rate spiked and remained elevated for a long time. His blood pressure was going up and down. He became alarmed. And so, you know, we both jumped on a conference call with them, talked them through it, let them know what was going on, and within four hours, it normalized. And that’s typically like, if somebody has like Epstein Barr or something like that, that’s kind of this latent infection, the body will do that and it’ll raise the temperature. Really hot. Feels like you’re having a fever with an elevated heart rate for, you know, four to six hours to burn it out.

Theo Lucier [01:09:36]:
And so we’ll, we, you know, we help people one on one as they need it too. So that’s pretty much the gist of it. You know, you’ve got a link I’m sure you can put somewhere here. And then what was the code that you wanted to use for this?

Nick Urban [01:09:50]:
Let’s use Urban.

Theo Lucier [01:09:51]:
Yeah. So if you use his code Urban, we’re also doing 50% off this year. The reason why is because we want more testimonials and we want more people through the program. Eventually this will be more expensive. It’s just as it grows, it’s starting to get a little more involved. We’re going to have to hire people and bring in some more resources. But right now we said, you know what, let’s just do 50% off. We’ll get more people through.

Theo Lucier [01:10:20]:
We want more testimonials for the site. So if you use his code Urban, you can get 50% off and you’re good to go. And that’s on June 25, 2026. Starts at 3:00pm Pacific Time.

Nick Urban [01:10:34]:
Nice. I was going to make sure you’ve included the next cohort date.

Theo Lucier [01:10:38]:
So that’s it. What about you? Are you joining us? Are you thinking about it? Yeah. You don’t have, you don’t have to do five.

Nick Urban [01:10:44]:
No, I think five is the next step for me. I’ve done three and three was good. It was a challenge. But I knew that to go through, there’s no four option. So three to five. And I think I’m ready for the five at this point. And I’ve done a lot of the different detoxification protocols. I’ve.

Nick Urban [01:11:00]:
I finished a zeolite detoxification edta and so I think I’m ready for the five. And having community is definitely going to make things a lot easier than going solo and wondering if the Aquaporins are messing up my dry fast or what.

Theo Lucier [01:11:16]:
Yeah, the community is great and you know, who knows, you know, occasionally, usually every group we have somebody that does a seven and we support them the whole time. You know, not saying you need to do that, but if you should, you feel really good. You know, we’ll support you through doing a seven as well. But yeah, we’d love to have you and that’d be phenomenal.

Nick Urban [01:11:39]:
Amazing. Well, Theo, this has been a blast as the other times we recorded. I’ll put the links to the other conversations we had in the show notes for this one as well. I have a bunch more questions that didn’t get to cover that are on non dry fasting related topics because that is also your wheelhouse. We’ll have to save that for yet another conversation before we close out today. Any parting words, any final thoughts for people who have made it this far?

Theo Lucier [01:12:01]:
Yeah, I would say that since most of this podcast was about, you know, dry fasting and fasting, I would say fasting and dry fasting. It has this wonderful effect of shedding that which doesn’t serve you and that’s in all areas of life. So if you have emotions, feelings, even beliefs that don’t serve you, those go away. It’s just a natural part of the process of, you know, stripping away the superfluous parts, I guess. But if you want a total life reset, do a dry fast. And if you’re not Ready for a five, just grab the free resource@dryfastwithfriends.com and just start with a 24 hour. Go Lunch to lunch or dinner to dinner. It’s great.

Theo Lucier [01:12:44]:
And, and you’ll, you’ll, you feel so good the next day when you get to have water and food and it’s just like it makes you appreciate everything. So just try it. It’s fun.

Nick Urban [01:12:53]:
Well, Theo, thank you so much for joining me. I’m ready for to close out one chapter of life and begin the next. So I’ll see you on the other side. And to all of you, thanks for joining us and sharing your time, your energy and attention. Until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes and resources mentioned at outlier.

Nick Urban [01:13:30]:
Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.