One of the biggest advantages to fasting is cellular autophagy. However, adding more to the snake juice will diminish the autophagy and detox effects, especially if juices are added. Looking at the optional ingredients (to be mixed separately from the main snake juice) :

• The apple cider vinegar is recommended. It is good for blood sugar control, lowers LDL cholesterol and is great for gut health. Two tbsp is 6 calories so if you want to be a purist you can always avoid and take plenty before the fast starts.
• Lemon juice is recommended, but the acidity might damage your teeth if you sip it all day in your main snake juice. Take it all at once and rinse your mouth out with water. Again there are a few negligible calories.
• Borax is a must. But you have to be careful as it’s a white powder just like the LoSalt and baking soda. Borax powder contains boron and it’s an amazing element that will prevent and reverse osteoporosis and arthritis. The pharmaceutical industry sells $30 billion worth of arthritis drugs per year (not including the pain killers that people take for joint pain). Big pharmaceutical companies have vilified borax and have either banned it or labelled it a poison (it’s banned as a food additive with the exception of caviar!) A years supply of borax, giving a daily 30mg therapeutic dose of boron, costs $0.10 and has ZERO side effects. A years supply of the arthritis drug Plaquenil costs $1300. Enbrel injections would cost $62,000 per year. Here are the LD50 per kilo body weight (lethal dose to kill 50% rats):
  • Borax: 2.66g/Kg
  • Baking soda 4.2g/Kg
  • Salt: 3g/Kg
  • Tylenol: 2.4g/Kg
    You would need a pile of borax powder to kill yourself. Our advice would be to make up a borax solution and label it for use.
• Cayenne pepper. Cole uses cayenne pepper for his snake juice. It’s down to personal taste, so just try a little in a glass to see if you like it. Cayenne is great for the stomach so you might want to try it

Drink these in a small glass of water early in the day. Boron boosts brain activity, so taking it late at night will affect your sleep. Wash your mouth out with water to get rid of any acidity that might affect your teeth.

Snake juice extras

You can take a small glass of the main snake juice and squeeze half a lemon into it. Add 2 table spoons of apple cider vinegar. Add a pinch of cayenne pepper or as much as you are comfortable with. Add a tablespoon of the borax solution you have made earlier:

Making the borax solution.

This is a molecule of borax: Na₂[B₄O₅(OH)₄]_·8H2O    It has a boron content of 11.3% by weight.

• Put 1 teaspoon (5g) of borax into a litre of water. This will contain 0.56g or 560mg of boron.
• Clearly label the bottle and keep it somewhere safe.
• 1 tablespoon (15ml) of this dilute borax solution will have roughly 8mg of boron. 2-3 tablespoons  of the diluted solution is a theraputic dose.
• You could add a tiny pinch of borax powder to each 1.5 litre bottle of snake juice. But the quantity would be a little random. A tiny pinch would roughly weigh 0.2g (yielding around 20mg of boron).
• Boron is a critical mineral. See more about borax here.

Micro-nutrient additions

It is important to not be deficient in micro-nutrients before you start a longer fast.

• Taking a small multi-vitamin each day is a good idea. Centrum only contains 80mg of magnesium, but some multi-vitamins have a full 400mg (so you can omit the magnesium sulphate from the mix if your chosen multi-vitamin is high in magnesium). The range of water soluble B vitamins and vitamin C are very important. Try and take a split dose of vitamin C each day, half in the morning and half later in the day. A berroca with zinc is a good vitamin C supplement. The average half life of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in adults is about 10-20 days. When you are eating food normally, make sure that you are getting plenty of vitamin C rich foods such a guava, kiwi, berries, pineapple, papaya etc.
• Taking other capsules, such as fish oils is not recommended when fasting. You can load up on omega-3 from krill oil or fatty fish before you start the fast.
• You certainly shouldn’t be taking bulkier supplements such as glycine, creatine or protein powders. You might not drop out of fat burning mode, but they will affect autophagy.

Fat breaks down to carbon dioxide and water

After your glycogen stores are depleted after 12-16 hours of fasting (more if you are sedentary) you will start to convert fat into fuel, this process is called lipolysis. Fatty acid metabolism consists of catabolic processes that generate energy and anabolic processes that create molecules such as triglycerides, phospholipids, hormones and ketone bodies. The free fatty acids created in fat breakdown ultimately produces ATP. Fatty acids yield the most ATP on an energy per gram basis, when they are completely oxidised to CO₂ and water by beta oxidation and the citric acid cycle. So when you beak down fat you hydrate yourself by making water.

You might find it quite hard to drink 1.5 litres of snake juice as your body starts breaking down fat into water.

Is fasting safe?

Humans evolved to go without food, in fact we can go for weeks without eating. Eating constantly is a relatively modern thing and is not good for optimal health. If you start a fast with a good micro-nutrient profile and drink sufficient electrolytes throughout the fast, you will feel good. You even do hard exercise several days into a fast because your body is using your fat as fuel. Fasting triggers regeneration and detoxification, it also balances your hormones. You really need to give your body a break from insulin spikes.

If you can do a series of controlled fasts, it’s easy to get your weight rapidly down and become lean. Once you are lean you can plan a maintenance diet of calorie dense whole foods.

A fasting focused lifestyle allows people to lose weight and keep it off. Conventional calorie restricting diets don’t work because they allow you to eat all day, spiking insulin. People pile the weight back on. Exercise alone will not drop the pounds. You can visit the gym and do classes all week for very meager returns, especially after you hit 40. So many people pound away in the gym but eat 6 meals and snacks a day, thus achieving little or no weight loss.

Just start an electrolyte fast and review how you feel after 48 or 72 hours. Standing on the scales will give you all the motivation you need. Fasting should be the preferred option for people carrying lots of extra weight.

If you don’t fast, what are the options if you are overweight or have metabolic diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer? The conventional options are:

• Suffer in silence.
• Delegate your health to a doctor.
• Treat the symptoms, not the cause.
• Take drugs for life, often with severe side effects.
• Surgery such as organ removal and stomach stapling.

Nobody makes money if you are healthy. We live in a crazy world where a doctor is allowed to offer stomach stapling to a morbidly obese patient, but is not allowed to suggest fasting!

START FASTING   →  SEE THE BENEFITS  →  RE-EVALUATE

What is ketosis?

There is so much nonsense on the Internet regarding ketosis and ketones. The body is quite capable of burning fats without the need to produce ketones, fatty acids are broken down throughout the body. So let’s take a step back. All fats in the body are glycerides (glyceride = glycerol + fatty acids). When a fat breaks down, a long chain of carbon with an acidic part at the end is produced which is called a fatty acid. Fatty acids are bound to the protein albumin when they are transported in the blood. Fatty acids are ultimately oxidized by β-oxidation into acetyl-CoA (Coenzyme A combines with the fatty acid to produce the activated version). Because one triglyceride molecule yields three fatty acid molecules with as much as 16 or more carbons in each one, fat molecules yield lots of energy. When glucose levels are low, triglycerides can be converted into acetyl CoA molecules and used to generate ATP through aerobic respiration. For complete combustion of fatty acids (to ATP plus carbon dioxide plus water) glucose is required to keep the citric acid cycle running. If glucose is not available, acetyl CoA is converted to molecules called ketone bodies. The fat-derived energy (ketone bodies) generated in the liver enter the blood stream and are used by other organs, such as the brain, heart, kidney cortex and skeletal muscle. Ketone bodies are particularly important for the brain which has no other substantial non-glucose-derived energy source. The two main ketone bodies are acetoacetate (AcAc), 3-hydroxybutyrate (3HB) and acetone. Ketone bodies are always present in the blood and their levels increase during fasting and prolonged exercise. After an over-night fast, ketone bodies supply 2-6% of the body’s energy requirements, while they supply 30-40% of the energy needs after a 3-day fast. When they build up in the blood they spill over into the urine. The presence of elevated ketone bodies in the blood is termed ketosis and the presence of ketone bodies in the urine is called ketonuria. The body can also rid itself of acetone through the lungs which gives the breath a fruity smell. All fat within the body has a glycerol backbone within the molecules, your body can break down fats into glycerol which can be broken down further into glycogen and glucose. Even if your body is fasting for days, it is still able to produce glucose from fat. We can survive without eating carbs and just ingesting protein and fats. Your body can make as much glucose as it needs, just by guzzling fat, whether it be stored or ingested. Your brain and cognitive functions are quite capable of running with a zero carbohydrate intake.