Water-Only Fasting: Beyond Weight Loss To Healing | Loren Lockman

Jennifer Norman:
We hear so much about what we should be doing for our health, what to eat, which supplements to take, what new routine to try. With all that advice, it can be difficult to hear something much closer to home, what our bodies may be telling us. My guest today, Loren Lockman, has spent nearly 4 decades exploring our relationship with food, rest, and the body's capacity to heal. He founded and directed Tanglewood Wellness Center for 29 years, Focusing on therapeutic water-only fasting and natural health. Today, through his platform, Fast to Rise, he continues to educate and coach people on fasting, whole food nutrition, and sustainable lifestyle practices. Loren's work raises some fascinating questions. What can we learn when we slow down and pay closer attention to our bodies? What role might fasting play in health, and where are its limits? And how can we bring more intention to the way we nourish and care for ourselves? We'll explore those questions today, drawing on Loren's experience while making room for the evidence, the uncertainties, and the fact that everyone's health needs are different.

Jennifer Norman:
Before we begin, a brief medical note. This conversation is for educational purposes and not medical advice. Prolonged water-only fasting can carry serious risks and is not appropriate for everyone. It requires medical assessment and qualified supervision. So please consult your healthcare professional before considering fasting and never stop or change prescribed treatment on your own. With that in mind, I'm looking forward to an open, thoughtful conversation about what it means to care for the body we call home. Let's begin.

Jennifer Norman:
Loren, welcome to the Human Beauty Movement podcast. It's so lovely to have you here.

Loren Lockman:
Thank you, Jennifer. It's great to be here with you.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow. You've been doing this for a really long time, so I'd love to learn. What first led you to explore fasting and natural health?

Loren Lockman:
Well, my story, I think, is probably not so unusual for people that wind up in this kind of a path. I got really sick at 23, and I got much worse with 3 years of medical care. And I woke up at 26 with the realization that medicine wasn't helping me. It was making me sicker. And I've come to the conclusion, having now worked with more than 16,000 clients, more than 12,000 fasting clients over nearly 40 years, that this is actually fairly common. This is what happens So I walked away from medicine at 26. I have literally never been to a doctor with the exception of trauma. I used to be a bit of an adrenaline junkie, so I've injured myself on various occasions.

Loren Lockman:
I've been in emergency rooms 4 or 5 times.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay.

Loren Lockman:
And there's— trauma medicine's amazing. I'm alive on several occasions because of it. I've severed arteries 3 times. Sever an artery, you definitely want to get that sewn back together. Right. Medicine is perfect for that.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
For anything else, in my opinion, not so perfect. And I think there's an underlying piece, Jennifer, that most people don't really understand. I mean, maybe if they think about it, they would say, well, yes, of course, but there's always going to be some caveat. There's no caveats. The bottom line is that both healing and detoxification, and those are the 2 primary things that your body can focus on when fasting, these are biological processes. And what that means is that only the body, only the organism can cleanse or heal the organism. Nothing you take, nothing you do can do that for you. No one can make that happen.

Loren Lockman:
Your body does that. And it does it best when we get out of its way. That's what fasting provides.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. You said some things that echo so many of the words that previous podcast guests have mentioned. And that is that the healthcare system is so broken.

Loren Lockman:
Completely.

Jennifer Norman:
It's really sick care and it's great for trauma. It's great for emergency medicine. There are definite places and special avenues for it and places for it. However, it really has caused us to lose that empowerment and that knowing of our own bodies, that, that sensibility that we can come back to nature, come back to home rather than like running to the doctor for a prescription for every single little thing.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly.

Jennifer Norman:
Which really throws our whole chemistry out of whack. And so, yeah. This is very important. I've never had anybody on that's talked about water fasting. And so this is something new for myself to learn all about this, as well as my audience. You have so much experience, so much expertise. So I would love to first talk about the body. Now, you often do talk about the body's intelligence, and I would love to know what that phrase actually means to you in practical terms.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, what I often say is that your body has virtually infinite intelligence with regard to its own needs. So I mean, I'm not suggesting your body can do your calculus homework for you if you're studying calculus. What I mean is that your body knows exactly what does and doesn't belong there. It knows exactly what needs to happen. Let me give you some examples that will probably help bring this home.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Most people in the United States over 50 have hypertension. Most people. It's not some people. It's a very, very common condition, right? This is high blood pressure. There are various different types of hypertensive medications. One of them, one type of medication, There's different brands. One of them slows down your heart rate, right? If you slow the pump, the pressure goes down. So here's the question I ask: who knows better how fast your heart should beat, your body or Merck Pharmaceuticals? Obviously, your body knows exactly what it's doing, right? Some of these medications reduce your blood volume.

Loren Lockman:
Okay, who knows better how much blood your body should have, your body or Pfizer Pharmaceuticals?

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Obviously, your body knows exactly what it needs. Okay, and we could keep going, but this is what exactly what I mean. When we're using medications, we're interfering We're interfering with the body's processes. We're manipulating the body again by reducing blood volume. So when we look at all of the hypertensive medications, they all have the same effect, right? The idea is to lower blood pressure. The way they do that is by artificially opening the blood vessels. Some of them dilate blood vessels, some of them slow the heart rate, some of them lower the blood volume. There's other mechanisms, but they're all accomplishing the same thing.

Loren Lockman:
And what they're doing is they're ensuring less blood flow in any given amount of time. So again, who knows better how much blood should be getting to your brain? Now let's talk about the brain for a second. I'm 6 feet tall, 170 pounds. My— the brain weighs roughly 3 pounds, might be a little less than that, but that means for, in my case, it's less than 2% of my body weight. I'm guessing you're a bit smaller than me and your, you know, your brain might be a little bit more than 2% of your body weight, but it's less than 2% of my body weight, but it gets more than 35% of the blood supply. It's pretty important. If we reduce blood supply to the brain, what happens? Well, the number one reported side effect of hypertensive medications is depression. And that's because we're getting less blood, less oxygen, less nutrients to the brain.

Loren Lockman:
Number one unreported side effect of these medications, we're not going to think very well for the same reason. The blood, the brain's not getting the blood that it needs to function properly. It's the exact same thing happening. So these are, and we're just talking about a couple of side effects. Right. Every medicine.

Jennifer Norman:
And then you'll go on an antidepressant to help that. And then you'll, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the list goes on.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly. I mean, as I'm sure if you want to really open your eyes, right? Anyone listening, if you open Time or Newsweek, any mag— I'm not even sure what magazines are still published. I don't read magazines, but if you open a magazine, you will see ads. You know, maybe it's a quarter page ad for Ambien or one of these drugs, right? They're very common now, these, these drugs. And there'll be warning, side effect notice there. But if you go to the Journal of the American Medical Association, they have a higher standard. This is a journal for doctors. In those journals, you'll see the same basic ad that you see in Newsweek, except it'll be a full page and there'll be a facing page that has all of the side effects.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
In fact, I spent 22-plus years in Costa Rica. Living in Central America, that's where the center was. And that's where we wound up. We started in the US, but when I came back, I spent some time with my mother before she died. And I stayed at her house and I would work all day from 6 or 7 in the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. She would sit in front of her television every day from 4 in the afternoon until 10 o'clock at night when she'd go to bed. Every single day, that's where she was, right?

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
If I wanted to talk to her, I was talking to her while the television was playing in the background. And so I would sit there with her sometimes for an hour or two. I, cause I haven't had broadcast television myself for many, many, many years, 25, 30 years. I was blown away by the fact that almost every other ad, every other commercial was for a drug. Now you may be aware of this.

Jennifer Norman:
I was going to say you probably saw a lot of pharmaceutical ads while you were with her.

Loren Lockman:
I couldn't believe it. I mean, it wasn't that way last time I had normal broadcast television, like in my own home. And I was watching it regularly. I never saw that before. The US is now one of only 2 countries in the world where it's still legal to advertise pharmaceuticals on television.

Jennifer Norman:
Direct to consumer.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly. It's illegal in every other country except one. It's just the US and this one. No, unfortunately, what's happened here is pharma took over medicine in 1910. So there's no doctors alive today who didn't come through the current system where everything was completely controlled and driven by pharma. And of course, pharma has one objective, and that objective It's not to make you well, right? In fact, that's not their objective. It's not like, well, they can get well. It's okay if you get well, if you're, if they're making money, they don't make money if you get well, right? They want to keep everybody sick in the system.

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Loren Lockman:
Now think about that. You're buying products from someone who has no intention of helping you get healthy. It doesn't feed their bottom line. So this is the system that we all live under. And the problem is, is that most people are brainwashed to believe that your doctor knows everything about health.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Now, this is probably so obvious. I know you want to jump into one, just one more quick thought. So obvious that most people, we don't even need to discuss this. Like, I mean, is it important what you eat? Of course. Of course it is. Can you be healthy if you live on McDonald's? Probably not. That's probably not going to happen, right? We know this. The average doctor graduating from the best medical schools in the world today, on average, will have had one 3-hour lecture on nutrition.

Loren Lockman:
They don't know anything about health. What they learn is how to suppress the symptoms of disease. That's all. So that's medicine. We have to start by understanding that healing is a biological process. Taking toxic substances, which all pharmaceuticals are, can't ever heal anyone. They can help you manage symptoms. But by doing that, one more example of this, right? By doing that, they're not helping you.

Loren Lockman:
You've probably at some point in your life woken up with a head full of mucus. What do most people do under those conditions?

Jennifer Norman:
They might get an antihistamine. They might take some cold medicine.

Loren Lockman:
Most people walk to the medicine cabinet. They already own the products, right? They walk to the medicine cabinet, they take something out and they take it. And within a few hours, congestion's gone. And they think, okay, I fixed that. But here's what they don't understand. Your virtually infinitely intelligent body created that mucus on purpose to encapsulate proteins in your bloodstream that don't belong there so you can get rid of them without them harming you. We take away the virtually infinitely intelligent body's best way of dealing something, and now the likelihood that it can deal with it adequately, not very good. And the cure, the remedy that we took is actually toxic to us.

Loren Lockman:
So we're not getting healthier when we do these things. We're getting less healthy all the time.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. I think that, I mean, there are so many things I could probably wax on for hours about the fact that modern day culture, society, the way we work, the way we live, the way that there's stress and on all of these kinds of things that happen that force us to try to suppress these things because we have to act, we have to get back to work, we have to be our best selves, you know, quote unquote, right immediately. And there's this immediacy need right now that causes us to want to suppress and to hide and to just dampen all of these things. And we don't have patience to let the body do its natural thing. And the nutrition, the kind of fast food that we've been consuming, the way that the healthcare system, a lot of these things, yes, they were built for convenience. They were built for us to be on the go and move quickly. But has it been good for us? Has it really been serving the true nature of how our bodies are made, how we're designed? Has the body been able to adapt fast enough to catch up to this? And the answer is no.

Loren Lockman:
No, no. And it's never, it's never, I mean, the body's not going to adapt to taking in toxic substances. I mean, it may adapt in the way that it learns to better dispose of them as well as it can. But, you know, I would suggest to you, having worked with so many people now over the last 40 years, that while our bodies are, they have to be constantly detoxifying, right? We have, it's, we don't, there's no agreement on how many cells we have in the human body. Estimates range from about 30 to 70 trillion cells, right?

Jennifer Norman:
Trillions.

Loren Lockman:
Trillions. Each of those cells is performing roughly 100,000 functions every second. So the complexity of the body, it's, I don't really think we have any way to wrap our heads around that. It's insane. It's crazy, right?

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, it's wild.

Loren Lockman:
You're too young to remember Gerald Ford when he was president. They said he was so dumb he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. That was 2 things. Each cell is doing 100,000 things every second, right? Insane. So the best we can do, I mean, the body, the average person, they're detoxing because each cell's like a separate organism. It has to be fed. has to process that food, has to eliminate cellular waste. If the body couldn't eliminate cellular waste at all, we would quickly die.

Loren Lockman:
Okay. We would drown in our own cellular waste. But here's the thing. The average person, their body's not keeping up with it. And so people are going downhill. They're getting more toxic every day. The average person, every single day, a little bit worse off. From one year to the next, they're worse.

Loren Lockman:
From one decade to the next, they're worse. They're worse than they were. And the average person today lives to 78, 79 years. We could easily live to 110. And I know that because people do that.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, Blue Zone people.

Loren Lockman:
I lived in a Blue Zone for many years. I went to many funerals with people over 100, parents of my friends, locals.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, there's something to be said. And certainly I think we are in a reckoning right now, and people are waking up to the idea that they want to take back that power. They want to be able to have more sovereignty over their own bodies. And so I think that this particular conversation is an important one because it It is an alternative. It may not be for everyone. And so I just want to make sure that, you know, people know that there are options available for you. This could be something that could be for you. It could pique a lot of questions for you.

Jennifer Norman:
Definitely, I would love for Loren to tell you how he got into, aside from being very, very sick at 23, how he got into specifically water fasting. Sure. And then talk about that much more in depth because I think that it's very, very intriguing. So, Loren, why don't you share with us? I know that you came about this after trying so many different things and kind of getting fed up and being sick. And since you've done water fasting, you haven't been sick for 40-odd years.

Loren Lockman:
It's coming up, coming up on 40 years now. Yeah. And when I, and I want to be clear, I don't mean not anything serious. I mean, not a cold, not a flu, nothing. And I would suggest, in fact, let's talk about what happens in nature for a second. There's estimated to be more than 20 25 million animal species, many of which are insects, but more than 25 million species. They operate at an amazingly high level of health and vitality all the time.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay.

Loren Lockman:
If we think about the 25 million species, which would you guess is the least healthy?

Jennifer Norman:
Probably human beings.

Loren Lockman:
I was going to say, give you a hint, there's 2 of them on this call right now. Yeah. By far. Number 2 are dogs. Number 3 are cats.

Jennifer Norman:
Because we feed them terrible food.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly. Because we feed them and take them out of their environment and give them things. No, we inject them with stuff like we do ourselves. We— exactly. And 4 through 100 are all the other animals that humans have taken dominion over. Animals in nature, much healthier.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay.

Loren Lockman:
So we want to understand this. Perfect health is the natural condition for every species. So what happened for me was I got very sick. And the first thing I thought was maybe I need to go back to nutrition. I started studying nutrition at 14, which is kind of unusual, but I grew 10 inches that year without gaining a pound. Wow.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
I shot up, no weight gain. I look like a stick with a nose and hormones are kicking in. I'm wanting girls to find me attractive. I look like a stick with a nose. I thought maybe if I study nutrition and start working out, I can build some muscle mass. So that's what I started to do. But it got me really fascinated with health and nutrition and human potential. So at 26, 12 years later, when I'm walking away from medicine, I'm thinking I need to go back to nutrition.

Loren Lockman:
I did. I went back to my books and I thought, oh, I'm doing everything it says I should be doing. And I thought, there's gotta be something wrong with this. But I tried homeopathy. I tried chiropractic. I tried herbs. I tried everything else I could think of and nothing helped me. And then I thought about the fact that I grew up with a dog and a cat.

Loren Lockman:
Did you grow up with any animals, Jennifer?

Jennifer Norman:
Oh my goodness. It was a menagerie at my house.

Loren Lockman:
Really?

Jennifer Norman:
6 cats and 3 dogs. Yes. Okay.

Loren Lockman:
So I'm willing to bet you've seen a dog get sick enough to refuse to eat.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Cats won't do as much of it. They'll do it too, but usually only a few days. A big dog can go weeks without a meal. Okay. And sometimes will, if they're sick enough, but it's a common thing. They refuse to eat. You can put it right in front of them. They won't touch it.

Loren Lockman:
Instinctively, they know that processing food takes too much energy. If they need to heal something, whether it's an injury or a sickness, they won't eat. Every species on the planet does this except us. And chances are good when you were young, if you got sick enough, you probably lost your appetite and didn't want to eat. And your mother—

Jennifer Norman:
But sometimes they'll eat grass.

Loren Lockman:
Well, cats and dogs will eat grass because grass is an emetic. So they eat grass if they need to get something out of their stomach. It makes them vomit. They don't eat it to heal. They just eat it to vomit if they need to. And if what's going on doesn't require vomiting, then they won't, they don't eat grass.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
So every species does this when it needs to heal. So first of all, we start off by understanding this is a completely natural process practiced by every species. In fact, it used to be taught in medical schools until 1910.

Jennifer Norman:
I wonder what happened in 1910.

Loren Lockman:
Pharma took over. John D. Rockefeller, first billionaire, took control of the American Medical Association, shut down over 70% of operating medical schools, and rewrote the laws about what they were allowed to teach. They were allowed to teach drugs and surgery, nothing else.

Jennifer Norman:
Interesting.

Loren Lockman:
Everything else was eliminated from the curriculum because drugs and surgery is where the money is. That's what changed. And so I thought about this. I thought about the fact that I'd seen my, both my cat and dog growing up refuse to eat. And I started looking into this and realized every species does this. And then I came across a book written by a guy who had, was long since dead, talking about people going weeks without food in order to heal, give the body a chance to heal. And it made sense. At the same time, it sounded a little extreme to me, a little crazy.

Loren Lockman:
I didn't know if that was possible. I grew up with some exposure to fasting. I'm Jewish, but only on my parents' side. Both parents, you know, not religious at all, but, but we fasted every year for Yom Kippur.

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Loren Lockman:
I knew I could survive 1 day, so I thought I would try 2 days. And I parked myself close to the refrigerator just in case. And I survived 2 days. Then I did 4, then I did 8, and then I did 12. And I kept working my way up. And amazing things happened for me. Now, at the time, this was all pre-internet, right? There was, there was nothing. There was no online anything.

Loren Lockman:
We couldn't search that way.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
We had a search engine back then. It was called the Yellow Pages. And if you went there and you looked under fasting, there was nothing. So there were actually places that existed where you could go and do a supervised fast, but I wasn't aware of that. And I didn't research it. I just, I didn't know it existed. And so I did it myself. I learned the hard way.

Loren Lockman:
I made a lot of mistakes. It took me much longer than it probably should have, but amazing things shifted for me. And ultimately what happened was the change in me was so, so great because for 3 years I was literally dragging my butt around. I had, I was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, systemic Candida. And you're probably familiar with Candida.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
You know, when you have Candida, which is a yeast, and you've got sugar in your bloodstream, yeast and sugar create alcohol. So your body becomes like a still and it's hard to think clearly. I mean, there's literally alcohol being produced all the time. And so I had chronic sinusitis and I had 57 allergies. And I went to 3 doctors over 3 years. They all told me the same thing. The sinusitis, that was easy to identify. And And they said, take antibiotics.

Loren Lockman:
And I had, I don't know how many courses of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Now, the whole story's in the name, anti, against, bio, life. Antibiotics kill bacteria. So here's the thing that most people don't realize. A lot of people think bacteria are your enemy. They're not. We have a symbiotic relationship with them. And as you probably know, that means they do something for us and we do something different for them.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. We give them room and board.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Right? They live inside our bodies. How many? Is there a few? It turns out, and again, the estimates vary, anywhere from 1 to 1 to 10 bacteria for every one of our own cells.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
We're essentially, we're bacteria buses. Our job, primary job is moving bacteria from point A to point B. We're doing more of that than anything else we do. Bacteria are nature's garbage men. They're actually helping us by getting rid of dead and dying tissue. So when someone has a bacterial infection, what that means is they have the garbage in their body that those those bacteria want. Because if they didn't, those bacteria would go to somewhere else. They don't hang around if you don't have what they need.

Loren Lockman:
They're, you know, they show up where there's a problem. People think they're the problem. No, no, they're the solution. They're there to help us.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow.

Loren Lockman:
The last thing we want to do is take antibiotics. But I didn't know that at the time. So I kept taking antibiotics. And what that means is you're killing bacteria, which are the bulk of your body's immune function. And so immune function gets worse and worse, spirals down. You know, with childhood ear infections, because antibiotics have been so overused, they don't, they no longer have anything that works.

Jennifer Norman:
Uh-huh.

Loren Lockman:
Right? They're approaching it from completely the wrong direction. And this is the, I would say, just a philosophical issue with how medicine, what medicine thinks, right? Medicine thinks the pathogens are the problem. They're not.

Jennifer Norman:
Right. So I just wanna be clear though, because I know, I mean, there are, I think that people are so familiar now with healthy bacteria and probiotics, prebiotics, and things like that. And then I think that there is a class where people would say, okay, this is an unhealthy bacterial infection. And so, or, you know, there, there could be something dangerous about getting a bacterial infection, which could cause sepsis or what have you. So I don't know if you're saying, okay, never seek treatment if you have a bacterial infection or something like that.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. Let me clarify. It's a good point. First of all, I don't think there is such a thing as bad bacteria. Again, I think the garbage attracts the bacteria. If you have, it's, so it's the toxic toxicity in the body that attract that specific bacteria. And that's the problem. It's not the bacteria, it's the toxin.

Loren Lockman:
Let's say I had meningitis or I had bacterial pneumonia and it was, my body wasn't recovering. I would take the antibiotic. Okay. So, I mean, but this is really back to trauma. This is where it's an emergency situation. Okay. For me to deal with a normal infection, you cut yourself and it gets infected. I'm not taking anything.

Loren Lockman:
I'm going to allow my body to deal with it by fasting. Now, again, as you said at the beginning, this isn't medical advice. Everyone has to make their own choices. I don't believe there are bad bacteria. I believe it's the toxicity that attract those bacteria, but they're actually there to help. It's just that sometimes it's so severe, your body can't handle it. So there's some, there are times it may need help. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay. Fair enough. Thank you so much for mentioning that. I want to talk about the fasting because people will probably think this is counterintuitive and they'll say, wait, don't I need nutrients? Don't I need nutrition in order to help my body heal? Why does fasting help me heal better than what nutrients can do?

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. It's a very very good point. And this is something that people tell me all the time. No, we need nutrients to heal.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
We don't. I mean, the science is clear. Again, every species instinctively stops eating. Doctors were taught for millennia until 1910 to supervise fasts. It turns out we don't really need the nutrients to heal. Yes, we need nutrients to do lots of things. And I'm not saying there's nothing necessary, but at any moment in time, we have the nutrients we need in the body. We need to be replenishing things, sometimes, but the best thing we can do to heal is to fast.

Loren Lockman:
And we see it working with almost everything. So let's come back to hypertension. The majority of adults over a certain age have hypertension. And do you know anyone with high blood pressure?

Jennifer Norman:
I'm sure I do. My parents both did, but they're both deceased now. But okay. Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. So they, your parents were probably told that they were going to need to take these medications for the next month or two, right?

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, they took them for years and years and years. And my father had open heart surgery twice.

Loren Lockman:
What they're told is you're going to take these medications for the rest of your life. Now think about what that means. That means this isn't gonna heal. This isn't gonna get better. They're, they're not pretending it's going to. They're telling you right up front, you're gonna take this forever. Mm-hmm. They're saying there's no way to heal this.

Loren Lockman:
So far I've worked with more than 1,500 hypertensive clients. Every single one of them has eliminated hypertension with no medications by fasting. Now, one of the primary causes of hypertension is arterial plaque. We call it atherosclerosis. You damage your arteries because you're eating things, primarily because you're eating things you shouldn't be eating. The body then goes to patch the damage. And it's like a tree falling across a stream, right? Tree falls across a stream. Now branches and leaves coming down the stream get stuck.

Loren Lockman:
Before you know it, you've got a dam. And this is the way plaque builds up. It adheres to the artery walls. Your arteries get narrower, narrower, and they become stiff because arteries are meant— they're flexible tubes, right? So when the heart beats, they dilate and they actually help move blood through. But what happens when they get stiff? In fact, the common name for atherosclerosis, you know what it's called, at least in North America?

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Loren Lockman:
We call atherosclerosis hardening of the arteries. When they're lined with plaque, they can't dilate anymore. They can't constrict if they need to. They're stuck and they're narrowing all the time as more of this plaque builds up. The result of that is to drive up pressure, right? Again, so we have some drugs, as I said, are meant to open up the arteries, right? Some are meant to slow down the heart. There's all these different means. Statistically, taking hypertensive medications doesn't extend the average person's life by a single day, has zero impact. It doesn't reduce the incidence.

Loren Lockman:
of heart attacks or strokes. What it does is it gives you good numbers so your doctor can say, oh, you're doing fine, your blood pressure's down. You're not actually helping anything because you're just treating a symptom while the underlying condition is unchanged. It doesn't make the plaque go away. Not at all.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
I mean, the bottom line is we, we simply, in order to heal, we don't need more nutrients than we have in the body. What we need is the ability to put our energy into healing. So the restorative processes of, of healing, repair, growth, all these detoxification, all these things require a lot of energy. And if we're eating, a lot of our energy is going to our digestive tract and we don't have the energy we need to cleanse and heal the same way. And so—

Jennifer Norman:
It's true that when a lot of people eat, you probably recognize this, you feel sleepy afterwards. And it's because your body is using so much energy to process the food that is in your stomach.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly.

Jennifer Norman:
And get that out so that people can essentially relate to. But I think that people would think over time, well, isn't food energy? And wouldn't I need energy to be restored in my body in order for it to heal?

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. Well, that's, that's, it's a that's a really great question. We're getting 2 primary things from food. One, we're getting the nutrients you've asked about, and 2, we're getting energy, right? Energy is measured in calories. And so many people listening, I mean, that's a common belief, I suspect. People may think, if I skip lunch, I might die, right? That would be a pretty silly design if that were the case. In fact—

Jennifer Norman:
Maybe emotionally they feel that they might die.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly. The truth about this is, is that the average person has between 6 and 8 weeks worth of fat reserves. Right. And people today, I mean, today, a lot of people, most people—

Jennifer Norman:
A lot more than that. Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
I like to say people who are wealthy in nutrient reserves, right? They have a lot of fat. Those people can go much longer. The longest fast in history was 382 days, no food. There was a medical study where dozens of people who were all 400 pounds and up fasted for an average of 5+ months. And my longest client fast was a young man who was morbidly obese. had stage 4 testicular cancer, fasted for 4 and a half months. And when he was done, there was no trace of cancer. Okay.

Loren Lockman:
So how does the body get energy? We talked about the nutrients. We, our nutrient needs go way down when we're in fasting physiology. There's just a change. So for instance, 4 and a half months, even people, I mean, I've fasted more than 1,000 people for 6 weeks or longer. And many of those people, if they were eating and consuming no vitamin C, they'd wind up with... But nobody wound up with scurvy fasting for 6 weeks and beyond. 6 weeks, 7 weeks, 8 weeks, even 4 and a half months. No scurvy because our nutrient needs change when we're in fasting physiology. But how about the energy you asked about? So when we fast, the body consumes fat as the primary source of energy.

Loren Lockman:
That's actually why we store fat. I mean, we need to have some fat to survive, right? Your brain is mostly fat. As a woman, how do I say this? Some of the most interesting parts on a woman's body as a man are made of fat. Okay? Breasts and thighs and butts are fat. There's fat there. Mm-hmm. And for the woman's body to function properly, you need to have more fat than men do. But essential fat, the fat that a human needs to survive, is about 2.5%, somewhere between 2% and 2.5%.

Loren Lockman:
And yet the average woman that I've measured, and we've been measuring this now for more than 22 years, comes in at about 35% fat. Now that's way too much. much. Okay. My opinion is most women should be between 15% and 20% to be healthy. And most men don't need more than around 12%. But most men are 25%, most women 35%. So when we're fasting, what our bodies are doing is they're converting fat into fuel.

Loren Lockman:
Okay. They're using fat instead of food, right? Fat is stored energy. That's why we have it.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
The body's converting that fat into ketones to meet most of our body's needs. Now, we also, we do need a little bit of sugar and we're getting most of that by converting small amounts of muscle too. And it's called— it's a process of creating new sugar. So gluconeogenesis, which means new sugar production.

Jennifer Norman:
Now, coming from the traditional beauty industry, as I have, anorexia was always a very big topic and eating disorders and things like that. And so I just want to be very cautious about what the difference is between doing a fast supervised and stopping eating because you're not happy with the way that you look or you feel that you're not the right weight. Can you speak to that, please?

Loren Lockman:
Yeah, absolutely. As I'm sure you realize, and most people listening realize, anorexia is an emotional condition, right? It's a psychological issue. These are mostly young women. I mean, the vast majority of anorexics are young women, 25 and under, and they— it's body dysmorphia. They think they're overweight. You know, they might look like toothpicks, but they think they're too heavy and they don't eat enough. And of course, it's really no different with other eating disorders as well. People who make themselves vomit, it's often the same psychology going on.

Loren Lockman:
So these are emotional and psychological issues and not physical issues. Someone— it's not, you know, it's not the act. It's if you're working out because you want to be healthy, that's one thing. If you're working out because you want to have 97-inch biceps, right, that's unhealthy.

Jennifer Norman:
And a lot of people are doing it more for the aesthetic reasons than for the actual health of it. Well, and to be—

Loren Lockman:
look, Listen, I don't think any of us are immune to having some vanity. We have egos, right? I have a partner. I still want to be attractive.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to look attractive. I think when it becomes problematic— I mean, you've seen men, sometimes women too, mostly men who have arms that are completely unnatural, right? They spend hours at the day, per day working out and focusing on, you know, eating 12, 13 high-protein meals to build unnaturally large muscles. And by the way, I mean, bodybuilders on average don't live to 47. So doing what they're doing, it's not just emotionally, psychologically unhealthy. It's unhealthy to be that obsessed with your body. It's fine to want to look good. You're in the beauty industry. People want to look good.

Loren Lockman:
I want to look good too. It's not working as well for me as it is for you, but we all want to look good and you want to be healthy. Those are perfectly healthy objectives.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
That's when we take it to the extreme. And so it's not about them not eating. It's why are you not eating? Okay. I've worked with people who had eating disorders, but who had healed the emotional piece and were perfectly fine fasting.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
I've also met women, mostly young women, who were still in the throes of the eating disorders that wanted to fast because it was one more way they could lose weight quickly. And if I'm clear that's what's going on, I don't work with them. First of all, I won't fast someone if I'm clear that they're already so underweight that fasting them would be dangerous. Again, we're living on fat reserves primarily. If you don't have any, you're not fasting, you're starving.

Jennifer Norman:
So let's talk about that a little bit more specifically about how you determine who would be the right kind of candidate for doing a prolonged water fast.

Loren Lockman:
Sure, sure. So first of all, I mean, again, if I'm clear someone has an unresolved eating disorder, I won't fast them. If someone is too skinny to fast, I won't fast them. But, but here's the thing, I fast people—

Jennifer Norman:
So do you do a BMI or some sort of—

Loren Lockman:
Well, BMI is not a particularly good indicator. I mean, we can, yeah, we can look at BMI. I mean, sometimes it's just looking at weight, you know, because I mean, BMI can, can fail on the upper end. If you have someone that has a lot of muscle mass, they're going to have a high BMI when that's, it's not necessarily reflective of being too fat.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
On the low end, there are BMIs that are too low. But, but, but I want to hasten to say, I work with people all the time who are clearly not anorexic. They're trying to gain weight. Their bodies aren't working very well. They're not digesting, absorbing, or assimilating very well. And so they come to me underweight, wanting to gain weight, but unable to. And fasting allows them to heal the digestive issues, the metabolic issues, so they're able to put healthy weight on. So my old YouTube channel, the woman who ran that for me, she— I gave a lecture every day for an hour.

Loren Lockman:
She recorded all my lectures. She would edit them into the pieces she she thought we could use. She did a very beautiful job of producing, like 3 times a week she'd upload them to YouTube. And she lived on site for 4 years doing this with me. When she first came to me, I think it was either 9 or 10 years ago in April this past year, she was 5'7 and she weighed 88 pounds. She was not, she didn't have an eating disorder. That was clear. She couldn't gain weight.

Loren Lockman:
She fasted. Turns out she had type 1 diabetes and wasn't aware of it. She'd never had her blood sugar tested. Many people don't test blood sugar. It's not a routine thing. First day there, I took her blood sugar and it was around 300 when medicine says it should be 100 or less. And I believe it should be 90 or less. And it was 300.

Loren Lockman:
And I said, have you been tested for diabetes? She said, no. Why? I said, well, I think you might be a diabetic. Sure enough, when she went home, she got tested and she had type 1 diabetes. She fasted with me 4 more times and healed the diabetes, type 1. Medicine says that's impossible. She healed it.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow.

Loren Lockman:
She now weighs about 125 pounds, from 88 to 125.

Jennifer Norman:
Better.

Loren Lockman:
She healed her digestive tract so she could put healthy weight on. And I've seen this over and over again. So it's not being underweight's a problem. It depends on how underweight. There has to be still some fat reserves. I had a man once who was 6 feet tall, weighed 101 pounds when he started. I'm the same height and outweighed him by 69 pounds. He wanted to do 21 days.

Loren Lockman:
I let him go 16 and then I stopped it. He just didn't. It was clear he was out of fat reserves and he needed to be eating so he wasn't harming himself.

Jennifer Norman:
I gotcha.

Loren Lockman:
But I can, I can see that happening when it's happening. There are various clues that that's what's going on. So aside from people who aren't severely underweight or have eating disorders, I won't fast women who are pregnant or breastfeeding because it's, it can be harmful to the baby. If a woman's detoxing fast enough, it's going to get into the fetus. It's going to get into the breast milk.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
There are some very rare conditions where someone may need a medication and they can't fast while they're taking it. But there aren't too many other people that I won't fast. I mean, well, let me clarify. So at the center, I wouldn't fast people with severe psychiatric conditions simply because we weren't a psychiatric hospital. We weren't equipped to deal with people that had serious issues going on. But many people think you can't fast if you've got liver issues or adrenal issues or kidney issues. And I've helped people heal from all of those things by fasting. Again, I think it's important to remember that healing's a biological process.

Loren Lockman:
Only the body can heal. Fasting, when it's done both properly— properly is the key— and long enough, when it's done properly and long enough, all we're doing is giving the body the optimal conditions to be able to focus its energy on healing. And so we heal, we see almost everything healing.

Jennifer Norman:
So in your case, and in many of these cases, there was something to heal from. Do you, for a person who doesn't feel like they necessarily have too many issues, what would be the benefits? Or why would somebody do something that would be considered quote unquote extreme like this?

Loren Lockman:
And I'm guessing you're just asking for a friend. So here's the thing.

Jennifer Norman:
I'm asking for all of my friends who are out there. Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
I mean, listen, I work with people all the time, Jennifer, who are fine. They don't have hypertension. They don't have cancer. They don't have heart disease. They haven't been diagnosed with anything in particular, but they're not feeling and functioning as well as they'd like to. Maybe they're sluggish. Maybe they wind up having a little bit of brain fog. Maybe there's some specific things going on that just, it's not the way they want it And first of all, if you grew up, and I don't know very many people who didn't do this, but if you grew up eating conventionally, there's stuff in your body that doesn't belong there.

Loren Lockman:
If we think about the digestive tract, let's back up. I grew up eating everything. My mother was pretty strict, so we didn't have a lot of junk food in the house. But sometimes I was shocked when she would buy me chocolate fudge Pop-Tarts. Maybe that's when she was pissed off at me and wanted to hurt me. I don't know.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
You know, most of the time she would buy, she would buy Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies, you know, when we wanted Count Chocula and Lucky Charms. Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes she'd buy that stuff for us and we're like, okay, like we'd be going, yes, great.

Jennifer Norman:
And to, to a lot of families, sugar is a treat. It's like, oh, you were a good kid. Let's go get ice cream, you know, or something like that. So it's considered like a reward.

Loren Lockman:
Right, right. So, so I grew up, I grew up eating everything. I don't eat most things in the grocery store. I eat only whole foods. I don't, you know, it's fruits and simple salads, but I grew up eating everything. Now, if we think about eating animal products, okay, think about a carnivore or an omnivore, a 500-pound tiger. I don't know how tall you are because I've only ever seen you from here up, but I'm guessing you're petite.

Jennifer Norman:
I am petite.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. You probably don't weigh much more than 100 pounds.

Jennifer Norman:
Very close.

Loren Lockman:
Okay. 105 maybe. I do this a lot with clients, so I'm getting pretty good at it. So, so this tiger is almost 5 times your size. Your digestive tract is more than 2.5 times longer than the tiger's. All carnivores and omnivores in nature have short, smooth, straight digestive tracts because you don't want rotting flesh in the body.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
So if you've, you've had dogs, you feed the dog, an hour or 2 at the most later, you have to take it for a walk.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Because that meal goes through its body very quickly. Okay? In a healthy human system, it's 18 to 24 hours to move from one end to the other. In the average human system, it's 96 hours. It's what it takes most people to eliminate what they're eating. It's 8 to 12 times longer than it should be. And the reason for that is because people are eating things that don't belong in any living organism, let alone the human body. Right? Processed foods. Processed foods are devoid of water and fiber.

Loren Lockman:
And we need both to move through our long systems. We need sufficient amounts of water and fiber to be present to move things through our long systems, 30 to 32 feet long.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
When we eat flesh, which has much of the water cooked out of it and no fiber, zero fiber, we wind up with something that has trouble getting through the system. So I've heard people who eat carnivore-style diets admit they have a bowel movement every week, every 10 days, every 2 weeks.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh no.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. Which isn't a problem. It's not a problem as long as they're only eating once every 2 weeks. But if they're eating 2 times a day, there's a serious problem.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
There's a lot of backup. Exactly. It's exactly, you know, I love it actually. I don't know how you feel about profanity here, but I get to tell people to their face that they're full of crap. Because they are.

Jennifer Norman:
And I know that a lot of people think about fasting as detox and a lot of people will go on a water fast for a day or so. But I mean, you're, you're talking, or a juice cleanse, which is something that is entirely different. Yeah. But I want to hear about what a water fast actually is the way that you're doing it and why it's different from some of these fad detox fasts or intermittent fasting.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's a great question. So, so first of all, intermittent fasting, I hate the term because everybody If you sleep, then you're intermittent fasting. Unless you're eating 24 hours a day, you're intermittent fasting, right? It just means that you're sometimes not eating is what it really means. It's kind of a stupid term. I've been doing it for 34 years now. I typically eat once or twice a day. My first meal is usually not earlier than 2 in the afternoon.

Loren Lockman:
My last meal is not usually later than 7 PM. So I normally eat in a 4 or 5 hour window. And I've been doing this now for 34 years. And it's brilliant because the only thing longevity experts agree on, they don't agree on what we should eat or how much exercise we should do, whether it's okay to smoke every once in a while or drink. They don't agree on those things. They agree on one thing. Don't eat any more than you need to. That's the only thing they agree on.

Jennifer Norman:
And are you vegan, vegetarian, raw? How do you typically eat?

Loren Lockman:
I'm raw vegan. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
Raw vegan. Okay.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. I don't do anything cooked. I don't do any animal products. I don't do most vegetables. I eat fruit, mono fruit meals, simple green salads. And I guarantee my clients their highest level of health if they follow the same, the same directions. Now, of course, just changing diet is powerful, but fasting takes it to a whole nother level. I mean, I've worked with many people who eat perfectly.

Loren Lockman:
The longest I think has been 17, 20, and 22 years, people doing this.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow.

Loren Lockman:
21 days fasting changed their life. It's incredible what happens. It's so much more powerful. So what differentiates? First of all, there's a whole cascade of beneficial physiological changes that occur in the absence of calories and nutrients. And the only exception to that is spring water always contains inorganic minerals, and we need them to be there. When they're there, we set up a magnetic charge that allows water to move easily across cell membranes. Without it, so distilled water, it doesn't hydrate very well. And because it's negatively charged, it takes positively charged particles out of the bloodstream.

Loren Lockman:
Distilled water advocates say, well, that's fine. It's only taking positively charged pollutants. But you might remember from 6th or 7th grade science class, a positively charged pole attracts any negatively charged pole. It doesn't decide which ones. I don't like that one. I'm going to— It doesn't do that. Anything. We happen to have a few kind of important positively charged things in the bloodstream, like calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium.

Jennifer Norman:
Minerals.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. We need them to be there, and distilled water takes them out. So we're drinking— I'm drinking spring water right now. I'm stuck in the US right now. Spring water in a glass bottle. It's got about 65 trace minerals in tiny amounts, so small we can't add them to the water. And they're held in solution in a way that we can't really replicate because they entered the water as part of the natural hydrological cycle. So we don't add salt because if we add salt, your body can see this as something added and it sees nutrients and thinks, oh, there must be food coming.

Loren Lockman:
About a third of your energy goes to your digestive tract.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Taking you out of fasting physiology. So the benefits occur when the body knows it's fasting and there's nothing coming in but water. Okay. So that's the first piece. If you're drinking juices, as you said, it's a juice feast. You're not fasting. You can live on juices the rest of your life if you drink enough because they contain calories and they contain nutrients. Because you're not eating solid food, there is some ability, some greater ability for the body to detoxify, but it's nowhere like what happens when you're just drinking water.

Loren Lockman:
And I've had many people, including myself, my, my, I did, I did a lot of juice fasting, feasting. My last one was 4 months, 120 days. And then I did a week on water and I thought, oh, I'm not going to ever drink juices again. It was so much more powerful. One week on water was so much more powerful than 120 days on juice. I thought there's no point in doing that. So it's completely different than anything like that. Now, if we look at things like the cleanses of the liver cleanse, again, it's important to understand nothing cleanses the body.

Loren Lockman:
The body cleanses itself. The substances we're consuming don't act on the body. Okay. So the liver cleanses that are olive oil and what is it? Lemon juice. I forget what, what is it? Lemon. What's happening is it's bile and olive oil that are what people think are gallstones. It's solidified bile and olive oil. And if you leave them on a plate at room temperature, they melt.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
Okay. Gallstones don't melt. Gallstones are hard calcified things. And that's not what's happening. So these cleanses don't typically do much of anything. Real fast, again, every species on the planet does this instinctively. It's how the body focuses its energy on healing. And there's not much that the body can— now, I'm not saying everything can heal.

Loren Lockman:
It's important to understand. Every year I'm presented with 2 or 3 clients at least per year who come to me and say something like, I was just diagnosed with cancer. They've told me I've got a month to live. Will this help me? And that's a tough conversation to have.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
You know, I have to say to somebody, you know, I'm so sorry you're in this situation. It's very difficult for the body to heal at this stage. It's not necessarily impossible. It might still be possible to heal. And I've had people like that heal. Some, I mean, they, they don't, I mean, none of us live forever. I have a client, had a client who was diagnosed with one of the most difficult forms of cancer. It was a specific brain tumor that it would be possible... that everybody dies with.

Loren Lockman:
And her mother and sister had already been diagnosed with this and died from it.

Loren Lockman:
And then she was diagnosed. And when she was diagnosed, they told her, you know, if you don't get the same chemotherapy they had, you're not going to be here in a year, or months. And she said, well, it didn't work for them. I don't think I'm going to do that. So she came to me and she fasted with me instead. And she didn't fast as long as I asked her to. I told her she should do at least 26 days. I told her, and this is just from experience knowing how the body responds.

Loren Lockman:
You know, if you think about, you're going to have a party and maybe your house is normally clean. Mine, if I'm inviting people over, I've got some work to do first. Typically, you fasted with me and if I have an hour to clean, it's going to get to one level. If I have 3 hours to clean, it can, it's going to be much cleaner. It's no different with your body. The more time we give it, the more it can accomplish.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
So I'm not saying longer is always better. There's, you know, if you go so far that you have very few fat reserves, it's going to take longer to. Most of my clients fast between 21 and 30 days. That's usually the sweet spot.

Jennifer Norman:
What would be the minimum that you would say would be somewhat even effective to make any kind of difference? What is not significant enough and what would be like your bare minimum?

Loren Lockman:
It sort of depends on the situation.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, okay.

Loren Lockman:
If you come to me and say, and I know you're asking for a friend, but if you come to me and say, I feel fine, I'm great, I want to be healthier, I'd like to work with you for a week. I book by the week. So with one week, One week, you can fast 5 days, 2 days refeeding. People in that situation notice significant improvements in a week.

Loren Lockman:
It's amazing what happens in just a week. But let's say you come to me and say, I've got hypertension and I've got a week off. I would say to you, okay, you'll get some benefit from fasting for a week, but you're not going to heal hypertension in a week. That, that with 21 days, 100% success. With less than that, you know, it's just not long enough to get the, all the garbage out of the arteries. If we were looking at someone, I'm working with a client right now. She had somebody who didn't really know what they were doing guide her through a fast last year. She did 36 days.

Loren Lockman:
And she said, ever since the fast, I've put on 50 pounds. And this is a woman who's not much taller than you are.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
And so it's a lot of extra weight on her body. And she said, you know, this, it made me much worse. She said, I still, I believe in fasting. I don't know what happened. Well, what happened was her body began to break down and hydrate the old hard material. that gets stuck in the small intestine, but it wasn't long enough and there was, it was long enough. I'm sorry. There wasn't enough water to move that material out.

Loren Lockman:
And so it just got stuck there. And when she eats or drinks anything, she's told me, I'm eating 500 calories a day for a year and I've gained 50 pounds. You can't do that on 500 calories, right?

Jennifer Norman:
Well, yeah, I've actually heard others say that it's okay for men to fast, but not women because women need the fat and because the body likes homeostasis. If you throw it out of whack like that, that yeah, your body will swing back. It's kind of like a whole binge purge sort of a thing. And you'll gain back all this weight and then more or something like that. It's like a yo-yo diet. Can you speak to that?

Loren Lockman:
Yeah, I can speak to it very briefly. It's not true. The majority of, the majority of my clients have been women. Anyone who does alternative, works in alternative health sees more women than men. And it's not because women are less healthy. It's because women are much more likely to take care of themselves. And so the first 10 years or more of my practice, maybe 12 or 15, we were about 70% female, my clients. That only shifted when I opened my YouTube channel because my YouTube subscribers were overwhelmingly— in general, more men are on YouTube, more women on Instagram, which came later.

Loren Lockman:
So with YouTube, I started seeing more more men and it started to even out. But I've still seen at least 60% of the women, of the people I've worked with have been women. We see amazing things happening over and over again, all the time. What's, here's what's true. You know, many, many women, many people, but a lot of women go on diets and they, they dramatically restrict their caloric intake.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
And then when they, when they stop losing weight, they end the diet and they go back to doing what they were doing before and they regain all the weight they were— they took off.

Jennifer Norman:
Correct.

Loren Lockman:
Even faster than it came off, right? Because they've slowed down their metabolic rate, and now they're going to gain weight faster than before. So when fasting, it's interesting if someone is overweight. I work with people— I have a guy right now who started at 315 pounds, okay, with congestive heart failure. Healed. That's gone. 4 years of neuropathy, could barely walk. That's gone. He's now eliminating pounds and pounds of old material in every day from his system.

Loren Lockman:
But when someone starts with, with a lot of excess weight, your virtually infinitely intelligent body increases metabolism because it wants to get rid of that excess weight. I mean, many people like that overeat. He's not eating anything. Now he is, he's refeeding again, but he's not eating anything while fasting for, for more than 5 weeks. And so his body says, great, this is an opportunity to get rid of this stuff. It keeps the metabolism higher. So he continues to lose weight when he starts eating. Someone who's underweight, someone who's very petite like you, you're going to come in, your body's going to say, okay, after a couple days it's going to say, wow, okay, there's been no energy, no food coming in.

Loren Lockman:
Let's slow metabolism down because there's not a lot of fat reserves. You don't have a lot of fat reserves, right? So your body's going to slow things down so that you survive. And when you're done and you're even leaner than when you started, your body's— you're going to start eating, your body's going to say, okay, you know what? Let's keep metabolism slow so we can rebuild the healthy weight. So the only way someone rebounds— I mean, in her case, it wasn't food, it wasn't calories. You can't— science says you can't gain— to put on a pound of weight, you need 3,500 extra calories. Okay? Now, I'm not sure I completely believe that's the case, but that's what science insists is the case.

Jennifer Norman:
Really?

Loren Lockman:
So if you put on a pound of extra weight, you need 3,500 calories. She's eating 3,500 calories in a week. That's how many she's eating. That's not extra. That's all she's consuming to run her body. And in less than a year, she's put on 50 pounds. She would've had to have had that many extra calories on top of what her body needed to operate. She's still working and functioning and going through her day, right? She's not comatose.

Loren Lockman:
So it's not possible. In her case, she's rehydrating old waste. Water's heavy, right? I talk about this old stuff. People call it mucoid plaque. I think of the mucoid plaque as being like a giant sponge because it's absorbing In her case. So when someone breaks their fast and they go back to eating the way they did before, yeah, then they're going to gain weight because their body, you know, if they've purposely slowed metabolism down, they're going to rebound. But that does not happen with my clients.

Jennifer Norman:
We don't see that. Is that because it's gone for such a long period of time on fast? Or how is it different that your body would then know, okay, I'm not going to keep my metabolism slow while I'm starting to eat and break fast again?

Loren Lockman:
Right. Well, it keeps keeps it slow if you need to gain weight, and it speeds it up if you need to lose weight.

Loren Lockman:
So if someone needs to gain weight, it's going to keep it slow. But first of all, I'll share something with you that most people aren't aware of. At the end of World War II, when the Allies freed the Nazi concentration camps, the people who had survived, they looked like skeletons with skin on them. You know, some of these people had been eating a bowl of watery soup and a piece of bread every day, and that was all, right? Surviving on almost nothing. Many people starved, obviously. The Allies threw for the survivors. And a lot of people died as a result. Their bodies weren't able to handle all those calories at one time after eating so little for so long.

Loren Lockman:
It's called refeeding syndrome.

Loren Lockman:
So it's very, you have to break a fast very, very carefully. And I have a protocol that works. It works really, really well. I've been using it the same way now for about 25 years. Took me a while to figure out how to do it, but we're now about 25 years following the same protocol. It works pretty much for everyone. As long as people follow directions, by the time they're done the refeeding process, now they can start listening to their body. And if they're, if they're listening to their body, if they're, you know, if they're way overriding it, if their body is saying, that's enough, you can stop, and they keep eating, sure, they're going to gain weight.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay.

Loren Lockman:
One of the things we're trying to do while they're going through the process is have them begin to deal with their emotions better than they have before, because most of us haven't done a very good job of that.

Jennifer Norman:
True.

Loren Lockman:
You know, it's, it's interesting, Jennifer, my clients have come from 156 countries. so far. So far, every single person I've asked has known how to complete this phrase. I'm sure you can too. Big boys don't—

Jennifer Norman:
Cry.

Loren Lockman:
As males, we're taught it's not masculine to experience sadness, right? What are you doing? That's not— you're like, you're not a little girl. Stop doing that. Females are often taught that they shouldn't be aggressive. They shouldn't experience anger. Now, the truth, of course, is that all emotions are natural. We're all going to experience all of them at times, but we all are taught that we shouldn't experience certain things. There's something with us if we experience certain things. And this, this has us going through life looking to suppress emotions.

Loren Lockman:
This is the reason why people eat all the time. I mean, again, today we're in the developed world, more than half of the adults are overweight or obese. They're eating when they clearly don't need to, right?

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
And I mean, there's various reasons. One of them is, is that we've moved to a mostly junk food diet. Most adults now get more than 60% of their calories from ultra-processed foods. Yeah. Most people 25 and under get 65% of their calories from ultra-processed foods, right? You know, it's crazy. And these foods have been engineered. I don't know if you know this history. When the cigarette companies— laws were passed in the US, I think it was '86, maybe.

Loren Lockman:
I don't remember the exact year, but there were laws passed that prevented them from advertising on television. Sales dramatically fell off and they started looking for new markets. They looked for other places they could sell their cancer sticks, but they also branched out. And most of the big processed food manufacturing companies were purchased by all the big cigarette companies.

Jennifer Norman:
Yep.

Loren Lockman:
And the cigarette companies, you know, nicotine, which is naturally occurring in some foods like tomatoes and peppers and is good for us in tiny quantities, is highly addictive. So what do they— and tobacco has a lot of it. So what did they do? Well, they added more nicotine because what they wanted was for people to smoke as many cigarettes as they could until they die. They want to sell as much as they can. So they wanted to make it addictive. So they pulled out the same playbook. We're going to make processed foods. Let's make those foods something you can't stop eating.

Loren Lockman:
Maybe you've had this experience of sitting on the couch in front of a television, a movie, whatever, and you've got a bag or a box.

Jennifer Norman:
Chips, you can't eat just one.

Loren Lockman:
Well, you know, you look down and it's empty and you think, where'd they go? How'd that happen?

Jennifer Norman:
I've done that.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah, I've done that too.

Jennifer Norman:
Hidden sugars, all of the things that make you crave more.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly.

Jennifer Norman:
I want to talk about supervision because clearly this is something that you are recommending that people don't try on their own because it could be dangerous. And so having somebody sit with you to say, okay, based upon your— what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, your labs, et cetera, this is what I'm recommending in terms of how many days. What does supervision during a water fast look like? And then the process once somebody does break fast, how is supervision continued?

Loren Lockman:
Sure. So during the fast, I'll give you the whole process from beginning to end. Usually someone reaches out to me, they say, I'm interested in fasting. Well, there'll be a conversation. Some of it's online. There might be a quick call. They decide they're going to go forward based on the information. And once they've made the investment, what happens is we then we book an hour-long Zoom call where I explain exactly how to prepare.

Loren Lockman:
I give them the spreadsheet they're going to use to track all their numbers every day. And we're, we're looking at blood pressure, pulse, temperature, blood sugar, blood oxygen saturation, weight, body fat, muscle mass, water in the body. We're calculating a lot of things with those numbers, and we're tracking some behavioral things like how many hours of sleep you had the night before, how many times you got out of bed to pee at night, which tells me some interesting things, how many bowel movements you had, and how much water you drank. So we're tracking all that. We have 30 metrics we're looking at every day. And there's a daily group Zoom call. So I work with clients only remotely now, and every day at the time. Just before this call, I completed a call.

Loren Lockman:
I have a full group, right, in North America. Most of the time it's full. And so each day, each person gets on the call. They've done their numbers. We have a conversation in front of the group with each one about how they're feeling, what's going on for them, why their numbers are what they are, what they mean, what they're telling us, what they need to do and not do. I answer any questions they have, and they've got 24/7 access to me. And I guide them through the refeeding the process. At the end of the process, they get a written document to help them navigate the next 6 weeks, and we do a 6-week follow-up call.

Loren Lockman:
And it used to be that was it, and that worked pretty well for a lot of people. But some people had some trouble sticking to the program left to their own devices. And so my partner and I, not quite a year ago, kicked off an online community called the Fast to Rise Circle. And in the circle, I do an hour of live coaching every week. If you, you know, if they can't be there, they can submit questions in advance. I'm just answering people's questions. Once a month, the last Friday of each month, I do a live lecture in the circle. We put up a new video every week for the members based on their desires, what we think they need and what they're asking us to do.

Loren Lockman:
We have a very active forum, and this is all off social media so that they're not distracted and there's no one there who's not— it's a paid subscription, but when someone fasts with me, we give them 90 days free. So if we can get them through the first 90 days, most people are going to be pretty well, do pretty well. after that. So that's basically what the process looks like. It's interesting right now on the group call, the North American, I have 3 calls each day. I have a European call, a North American call. Sometimes it's only 2. Right now I also have a Pacific Rim call.

Loren Lockman:
So I've got people in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Southeast Asia sometimes. That one's usually smaller, but what was I going to tell you?

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, that provides a really great example of close supervision because I think some people think, okay, you're going to tell me what to do. I'm just going to be left to my own devices.

Loren Lockman:
No, no.

Jennifer Norman:
Not really, no. But you're with these people every day, pretty much.

Loren Lockman:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Jennifer Norman:
Making sure that they're calculating, they're keeping logs, and all of that. That's right.

Loren Lockman:
And I probably get 5 or 6 messages per day from the, you know, from the whole group.

Jennifer Norman:
That's right, yeah.

Loren Lockman:
You know, with a question, hey, this is going on, is this okay? Right? I'm feeling this, is this all right? And I get back to them as soon as I can.

Jennifer Norman:
What can somebody expect to feel like when they start fasting and then as they're continuing on? 'Cause I think that a lot of people would be like, oh my God, there's no way I could be able to fast even a week, let alone 30 days. That just seems like, you know, a really long time. And won't I feel like famished of hunger? Won't I be able to just not think? And can you, can you kind of share what the general feeling might be?

Loren Lockman:
It's a great question. It's a great question because I think, I think you're right. I think a lot of people imagine, well, it must be terrible to feel hungry that whole time. But that's not what happens. That's not what happens. What happens is the first 3 or 4 days, your body continues to produce ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. So your body is secreting ghrelin into the bloodstream and you're going to think about eating. And not everyone does, but a lot of people do.

Loren Lockman:
After 3 or 4 days, that goes away. And the reason that you don't feel hungry from then on is because remember, your body is getting its needs met. It's getting the energy it needs from body fat and a little tiny bit of muscle mass, right? For sugar. Your brain, your reproductive organs, and your spleen need sugar. And so if there's going to be a tiny amount of muscle converted to sugar throughout the process.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Loren Lockman:
It's, you can minimize how much muscle you lose by resting completely and by getting enough water. Now, how much water everyone needs, this is something that's very difficult to do well. And this is where I'm helping them by interpreting their daily numbers. But from there on, unfortunately, there's nothing uniform. You know, when I do the pre-fast call with each client, what I'll tell them is that what they're going to experience is going to depend on 3 primary factors. Number one, your genetic inheritance. Everybody has genetic strengths and genetic weaknesses. And so you could, uh, you and, and, you know, 6 other people could consume the exact same thing and all have a different experience with that based on your genetic inheritance.

Loren Lockman:
That's the first one. The second one is the nature of, the quantity of, and the location of toxins in your body, because a lot of what's happening is detoxification, right? Um, the third one is your level of vitality. It takes energy to mobilize toxins and for the body to heal. So if you're— if your vitality is very low, there's going to be going on. But it's interesting because people often say things like, well, fasting is painful, or fasting is difficult. And that's not actually true. What's true is that detoxification is painful and difficult, or can be.

Jennifer Norman:
Ah.

Loren Lockman:
If you're fasting, your body doesn't have a lot of detoxification to do. You might feel perfectly well. I still fast when I have something specific to heal. If I injure myself, for instance, I've broken bones, so forth. If I break a bone, I fast to heal. I don't do anything else. I just fast. I take no medications.

Loren Lockman:
I have— I've taken 2 ibuprofen in the last 40 years. I take no supplements of any kind, zero.

Loren Lockman:
And I just fast anytime I have anything significant to heal. But some people, I mean, what I tell people is you could experience the whole range of symptoms. Most of the time, most people actually feel reasonably well, just weak and tired. But the truth is you could feel like crap the entire time. That's a real possibility. It just depends on what it is your body needs to do.

Jennifer Norman:
Ah.

Loren Lockman:
You know, I'll give you an example. So usually when people are fasting, some people are going to have some nausea sometimes. And again, on this pre-fast call, I'm encouraging people to follow a specific protocol for the 3 or 4 weeks at least before they begin the fast, right? To eat as clean as possible and to increase their water intake unless they're already drinking quite a bit and to drink a very specific way. For anyone listening, we always want to sip water slowly, no more than 16 ounces or 500 milliliters per hour, slowly over the course of the hour. I could drink this, I could drink a full glass right now, but I'd pee it out and I'd be losing electrolytes.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
And if I'm eating every day and doing— I mean, there are people that do it every day, but they're eating, they're replacing them. If I'm not eating for a month and I'm flushing out electrolytes every time I drink water, I'm going to put myself in the hospital. Okay. So if they're, you know, I give them guidance on these things. If they do those things, um, they're, they're probably going to be fine. You know, most people are going to be perfectly But it will vary quite a bit from person to person. You never know what a specific person's experience is going to be like because it just depends on all those factors.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay. So they just have to listen to their body. And so if somebody is really having a tortured time, like I'm just thinking worst case scenario, and they're really going to be, you know, not feeling well, right? How do they know if they should continue on or if they should stop?

Loren Lockman:
Well, this, this is where having experienced guidance is really important. It's one of the, one of the places where it's really important. So again, many of the messages I get, whether it's, it's on our call every day or if it's between calls and someone's saying, hey, this is what's going on, you know, is this okay? And I'll get back to them and say, yeah, listen, no worries. And recently, about a month ago, a client fasting with me for the 4th time, she had been drinking a fair amount of water, typical amount of water for the end of the process, but she got nauseous and began drinking a quarter as much water for several days. And I kept saying to her, you need to get more water in. You need to. If you don't, you're going to wind up in trouble. And so I'm watching carefully and asking her about her symptoms to make sure she's not creating an issue.

Loren Lockman:
And one night she sends me a message and I'm reading the message thinking something doesn't sound right. So I called her and I get her on the phone. It was late at night. And I can tell from what she's telling me that, you know, she's, she's maybe a little bit confused. This is likely an electrolyte And so I said to her first thing in the morning, okay, you don't, I don't, you know, you don't need to do it now. It was already midnight, go to sleep. But first thing in the morning when you wake up, I want you to go to the hospital and get your electrolytes tested. And you do it there because if they're low, they can give you an IV.

Jennifer Norman:
Give you an IV.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly. And that's exactly what happened. And she's perfectly fine. And we actually have a conversation scheduled for Sunday. Um, she, this is her 4th fast with me. She's, you know, she's very happy with the process and how she's doing, but there was a challenge there and she wasn't aware of it. So if I hadn't said to her, go do this, she could have wound up in serious trouble. Right.

Loren Lockman:
So it's, it's knowing what is and is not okay. And again, because I've now done this with more than 12,000 people and done it many times myself, I mean, over the years, in the nearly 40 years I've been fasting, I fasted more than 3 and a half years of my life now cumulatively.

Loren Lockman:
As I said, probably more than I needed to because at the beginning I didn't know what I was doing. I was fasting a lot and I was making lots of mistakes and then it took me a while to Well, that's really, really intriguing.

Jennifer Norman:
I am really thinking that a lot of people would be very curious about water fasting and about you specifically, and maybe, you know, asking questions directly. So how can people who are listening to this podcast get in touch with you, learn a little bit more?

Loren Lockman:
Sure. Probably the easiest way to reach us, I mean, first of all, you can go to fasttorise.com. You can email us at support@fasttorise.com. That email is answered by my partner, Sylvie, who is much better at that sort of thing than I am. I stay very busy with clients and podcasts and making videos and so forth. And so she'll respond to you. And then if, you know, if it makes sense, we can schedule a quick call. We'll do a 30-minute discovery call.

Loren Lockman:
We also have a free ebook, and I think she's probably given you the link for that. If not, she'll do it tomorrow. She'll send you that link. But you just scan, scan the link. It's a QR code, and it'll ask you for your name and email, and then you'll have access to a free ebook all about fasting. And there's a lot of great information there. And so that's a good place for people to start if they're curious to learn more. But yeah, I mean, you know, there was so much more we could talk about.

Loren Lockman:
I mean, literally, we could talk for days.

Jennifer Norman:
I can tell. Well, clearly you do because you're constantly putting together lectures and videos and you are just a wealth of information about this and you can tell how passionate and how knowledgeable you are. So I really appreciate you sharing what you have today on, on this podcast. At the end of each of my episodes, I do ask 3 common questions of my guests. I love to hear the variety of answers. My first one to you, Loren, is what do you think makes you beautiful?

Loren Lockman:
Darkness. It's a joke. Yeah, close your eyes, close your eyes, and I'll be waiting.

Jennifer Norman:
You're speaking darkness of the soul?

Loren Lockman:
No, no.

Jennifer Norman:
A dark personality?

Loren Lockman:
Yeah, actually, it's, it's, it's a one— I'm, I'm kidding. You know, I, I will joke. So when I, when I, I encourage people who wear glasses to keep their glasses off and their eyes closed when they're fasting, because we virtually always see vision improve. I have 6 siblings, they all wear glasses and I don't.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah, well, I mean, obviously if so, and you know, if you need your glasses to get from point A to point B without walking into walls, put them on. But when you're, when you're resting, keep them off, right? So, but so I'll jokingly say all the time, take your glasses off. Okay, don't I I look better now.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
But, but the, but I, I, I actually, I love your question because I believe that what makes one beautiful, me or anybody else, is health. It's the glow of health. You know, I, over the years, uh, for many years I was 5% body fat, which is pretty low. And people would say, you're too skinny. And I would say, well, my pants fit. Too skinny for what? And, you know, but some, some people would say, yeah, but you know, you're, you're single. Don't you wanna meet a girl? Don't you wanna be bigger? And I would think, no, um, the woman who's right for me will see health, will know health when she sees me. It's vitality and vibrancy.

Loren Lockman:
You know, it's clear skin and supple skin and clear eyes, and you can see and feel the energy. So for me, that's what beauty is.

Jennifer Norman:
Love that. What does it mean to be human?

Loren Lockman:
Okay.

Loren Lockman:
That's a deep question.

Jennifer Norman:
Well, this is a human beauty movement, so.

Loren Lockman:
Right.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
I think, I think what it means, so we covered the first 2, the next one must be be about movement. We've done Beauty and Human. What it means to be human, I believe, you know, it's interesting. It's so easy, especially today with social media. It's so easy to be against things and people and ideas. And it's so easy, you know, people are so divided. I mean, the whole, you know, political arena in the United States is crazy.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
You know, if you believe, if you vote for this guy, there's something wrong with you. You're an idiot. You know, if you believe this person, uh, one of the things that occurred for me. In fact, I'll share something we haven't talked about at all briefly. Most people come to me for some physical reason. They want to feel better or they have a specific issue they want to heal. I actually believe the most important piece of this is our spiritual growth. For me, that's it.

Loren Lockman:
That really is everything. And when I began fasting and began cleaning the toxins out of my body, because I'd been smoking pot since I was 14, from 14 to 20, 25, and drinking alcohol and using other substances and eating And so I had a lot of detoxing to do. I'm sure that's a significant reason why I got so sick.

Jennifer Norman:
Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
As that happened, I began to interact with people, to relate to people in a very different way. And I find— I found it and still find it now, many years later. I'm 65 now, so I've been— this is a long time, but I find it easy to connect with most people, almost everybody. And I think the reason why is because I recognize that being human human means, we have the same desires. We all want to love and be loved. We want to be respected. We don't want to be taken for granted. There are certain things we want.

Loren Lockman:
We have the same fears. I don't think I've worked with anyone who— let me back up. I would suggest that as infants, we got a lot of our needs met. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family. We did well enough. My parents both drove nice cars and we had a nice house, et cetera. I had a lot of my needs met. There was no lack for food or shelter or warmth or But I would say there's one thing that we all needed that almost nobody got, and that was unconditional love.

Loren Lockman:
And the lack— and your parents, I'm going to take a stab in the dark here. I'm going to guess, Jennifer, that your parents didn't give you a billion dollars.

Jennifer Norman:
You'd be right.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah. And I know why they didn't give you a billion dollars. They didn't have it. They can't give you what they didn't have. They can't give you unconditional love if they don't love themselves. And most people don't. Most people are walking around believing that there's something wrong with them, that they don't belong here, that they're broken in some way, that they're unlovable. unlovable, that they're incapable of loving other people.

Loren Lockman:
These are things we all have in common. And so when I see someone acting badly, sometimes very badly, I still react sometimes, but I also usually before too long can remember, oh, that person must be really hurting. Right? I mean, who would act that way except for someone who's really hurt? And so it makes it easy, much easier to connect with people. And for me, being human is remembering that we're not only connected to everyone, we're connected to everything. We really are one.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. Yeah. Loren, that answer just hit me to the core. That was a good one.

Loren Lockman:
Thank you. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
My last question for you is, what is one truth that you live by? Hmm.

Loren Lockman:
The one probably foundational truth, I'll call it, that I live by is that I create my reality. You know, again, I work with clients mostly around physical health, right? I'm 40 years without a day sick. I'm creating that.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
I've got family members that are not creating that. All the other people I know, most of them are not creating that. They could, but they're not. I'm clear that there are people who are struggling financially. There are people that are very, very wealthy. I'm clear we create all of it. And so we can all do perfectly well. Again, we're spiritual beings, when we're connected to source, which I believe requires vibrating at the same frequency as the rest of nature, which is what happens when we clean the garbage out of the body and get the body hydrated, we begin to vibrate differently.

Loren Lockman:
And so it's so easy. You know, I've, I've had some fairly significant challenges in my life so far. I'd say more than my share. And yet it doesn't take me long to remember that I'm perfectly fine and that I can go back out there and create anything I choose to.

Jennifer Norman:
Exactly.

Loren Lockman:
So for me, that's, that's really the foundational truth that I wish everyone Right. Hey, you know, you don't have to worry. Just go out there and shift what you're doing and create what you choose to.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow. I love that answer too. And it's so aligned with the Human Beauty Movement, my perspective, connectivity, the truth that we are nature, the truth that we create our own reality, whether we like it or not, or like to believe it or not.

Loren Lockman:
Exactly.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. But it is absolutely the truth that I live by as well.

Loren Lockman:
The hardest part is when we wind up creating things that we don't really want. I mean, when this happens to me, I have to think, oh, why did I create that?

Jennifer Norman:
Yes.

Loren Lockman:
Right. And there's some— sometimes there are some uncomfortable truths there that I have to look at.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
And there's often the knee-jerk reaction to blame or to think outwardly that it's somebody else's fault. But we often forget to look at how our part in the process Exactly. So I— wow. Loren, I want to thank you so much for being here, for sharing your perspective on all of this information, for making room for all of the questions that I had that I can imagine that the folks listening are very curious about, who are just coming to learn about water fasting and want to see a better way of living, want to have more longevity in their lives, more health, more well-being, more energy. Less detoxification, all of those things.

Loren Lockman:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
I want to everybody who is listening to this conversation today, the one question that I hope that you'll carry away with you specifically is, what would caring for my body look like today? It could be a nourishing meal. It could be getting more rest, stepping outside, finally making an appointment that you've been putting off, calling that person that you love and letting them know that. It might even be giving yourself permission to need more support. You can be curious about new ideas and take your time evaluating them. You can appreciate your body's resilience and also honor its limits, and you deserve care wherever you are in your relationship. I will include Loren's links and in the show notes, all of the information, the link to his free ebook so that you can enjoy that for yourself. If this conversation brought up something meaningful for you, for you, I would love to hear that in the comments. And if you know somebody who would appreciate this discussion, please share it with them as well.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you so much for spending time with us today. Until next time, please take good care of yourself and each other. I'm Jennifer Norman, and this is the Human Beauty Movement Podcast. I'll see you in the next episode.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to the Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community-based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.